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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
theodp writes: To commemorate the 200th birthday of Ada Lovelace, Google's CS Education in Media Program partnered with YouTube Kids on Happy Birthday Ada! for Computer Science Education Week. For those seeking (much!) more information on The Enchantress of Numbers, Stephen Wolfram has penned a pretty epic blog post, Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace. "Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago today," Wolfram begins. "To some she is a great hero in the history of computing; to others an overestimated minor figure. I've been curious for a long time what the real story is. And in preparation for her bicentennial, I decided to try to solve what for me has always been the 'mystery of Ada'." If you're not up for the full 12,000+ word read, skip to "The Final Story" for the TL;DR summary.
At least that's what the narrative Dice has been pushing.
Once upon a time, You are all cows. Cows say moooo. Mmmmmooooooo moooooo! Mooooooooo cows mooooooo. Mooooo say the cows. YOU DISNEY STOLEN COWS!!!!
Smart as the guy undoubtedly is, I think it has already been established that Wolfram's greatest talent is for self promotion. I would really rather not see his blog become one of Slashdot's go-to sources for slow-news-day stories. He gets quite enough publicity all by himself without Slashdot slapping his every bloggy utterance on the front page.
Um... you know that thing where you said to read the summary? That's actually called the summary. Thanks for nothing, theodp!
All respect to women, programmers, engineers, and human-beings in general notwithstanding, don't you need to have undertaken something dangerous to qualify for the term "hero"? Especially "great hero"?
The dictionary definition mentions "exceptional courage and nobility and strength"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you have not seen the Difference Engine reconstruction at The Computer History Museum in Santa Clara, I highly recommend it. They actually operate it, and it's hypnotic to watch it.
Now you load more garbage on your web page than can be hauled buy a 20 ton garbage truck?
Was confused there for a second.
Why haven't Alice and Bob been replaced with Ada and Babbage yet?
Ah, I get it! They've moved SJW Friday to Monday. Brilliant!
This still doesn't explain why two very talented women I know don't have programming jobs, you shitlords. This still doesn't explain why both were chased out of the field by asshole managers.
I agree there are a few so I guess its right to make a big deal about them.
This article is good because Ada is the most controversial person in computer science. Some people claim she was a genius who invented computer programming, and others claim she was a fraud (Babbage told her what to write), gambler, and opium addict. Wolfram spent a lot of time reading through the original documents to figure it out.
According to Wolfram, she was educationally at the level of around a PhD candidate working on a thesis. She had gotten to the cutting edge of math knowledge of the time, and then had started working with Babbage, with him being kind of like an adviser. Looking at the machine, she did have some fresh perspective and ideas (like you would expect of a high-quality PhD candidate), and she did understand how the Analytic Machine worked. Wolfram predicts that if she had stayed alive, they would have been able to finish the Analytic Machine (Babbage was horrible at project management, and he would have helped her with that).
Ada comes out looking really good. She was not a fraud, and she did understand what she was doing. Unfortunately, you can't really call her the "first programmer," or the "first person to write a paper on Computer Science," but that's ok. She was a bright, energetic person, with some interesting ideas, who died too young to really investigate them deeply.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Back in the day, we were taught she was one of the very first programmers. She also happened to be a woman. She also happened to be, by that time and may ours, a promiscuous woman. She also happened to get uterine cancer and die.
Our teacher said she got it from being "exposed to many different sets of DNA from her multiple male partners" and encouraged the ladies in the class, yes there were several, not to be a whore.
And a human being born with a penis yet without a womb is a male. Deal with it.
+1 Funny!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
should read
I saw the Difference Engine reconstruction at the Computer History Museum a few years ago, and was fortunate enough to see the engine operated. It is hand-cranked, and uses ripple carry. The operator reported a significant increase in torque needed when the accumulator hit a major carry.
Now you are sounding like a feminist...
I brought up her being admired for her mind to counter the contention, that "Victorian society" looked down upon smart women.
The point of my original post was to question the validity of the term "hero", when applied to Ada Lovelace, who never had to risk neither life, nor limb, nor wealth, nor station in life to pursue her interests in Mathematics and computing.
Your — and others' — attempts to turn this into some kind of feminist debate is pitiful, you are grasping at straws in your struggle for relevance.
Yes, it sucks to be poor — in any era and in any society. It sucked even more to be a woman, simply because giving birth before antibiotics and tools-sterilization was dangerous, and rearing a child before baby-formula, refrigeration, gas stoves, washing machines, etc. made it a full-time job (though your use of the term "machines" is uncalled for and derogatory.)
More importantly, male "oppression" had nothing to do with it and your kind's attempts to drive a wedge between sexes is destructive to society and detrimental to both women and men.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
People should hardly be surprised that the daughter of one the great geniuses of the early 19th century was herself a genius. And moreover her mother, no intellectual slouch, was determined to educate her in mathematics, natural science and religion so that their daughter would not also be "mad, bad and dangerous to know".
Ada may not have been a fraud after all, but how about this Stephen Wolfram himself? Is his Cellular Automata based science all bullshit? Nothing useful seems to have come out of it.