Stephen C. Johnson, a computer scientist at Bell Labs, came up with the term "lint" in 1978 while debugging the yacc grammar he was writing for C and dealing with portability issues stemming from porting Unix to a 32-bit machine.
[5][2] The term was borrowed from the word lint, the tiny bits of fiber and fluff shed by clothing, as the command he wrote would act like a lint trap in a clothes dryer, capturing waste fibers while leaving whole fabrics intact.
In 1979, lint programming was used outside of Bell Labs for the first time, in the seventh version (V7) of Unix.
These include "warnings about syntax errors, uses of undeclared variables, calls to deprecated functions, spacing and formatting conventions, misuse of scope, implicit fallthrough in switch statements, missing license headers, [and]...dangerous language features".
[7] Lint-like tools generally perform static analysis of source code.