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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.
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.
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.
Why haven't Alice and Bob been replaced with Ada and Babbage yet?
I can't imagine why two women who hang out with an eloquent gentleman like you still don't have jobs. You all sound like winners to me!
I know, how eloquent! A gentleman... wait.
Let me try again.
All this hand-wavey bullshit about how "misogynerds" like me (again, the premise being that I'm male because I was born with an oversized clitoris) are chasing women out of tech is simply fucking wrong.
Oh, sure, you want to pretend I'm the one being sexist. That fits the convenient bullshit Narrative. You don't go after the asshole managers that chased them out, do you? Why not? Gee, I wonder.
So sure, I'm the one being sexist. I will admit that at this point, yes, those two women are better people than I'll ever be. I let you get to me, and that was a mistake.
I want to be absolutely fucking clear here. Anybody who invokes the difference engine is a cow. (Nods to cow guy up there.) When somebody says "difference engine" in response to Ada Lovelace, they reveal they're a dipshit who doesn't know anything about Lovelace.
Yes, I'm angry. I'm fucking angry. Have you even read her Notes? Has anybody else in this fucking thread read her Notes? I have. Have you? They're pretty good. She predicts MP3 players and video games.
The reason I am angry is that none of the SJWs (expand: social juggalo warriors) who keep pouring on this bullshit have read her Notes. They don't understand a single basic fucking thing about computers, much less the Analytical Engine architecture. Yet, they can conclude, based upon nothing except my assigned gender at birth that I am part of a vast conspiracy to keep women out of tech.
Nope, sorry, bzzzzzt wrong. You never, ever go after the asshole, sexually harassing, bigoted, sexist managers who are the reason those two talented women I know don't have programming jobs. Yes, I said sexual harassment. I busted one manager for sexual harassment, and then he doubled down on whatever the fuck was his deal until she just quit. Yes, I said bigoted and sexist. There is a lawsuit still open for gender discrimination in the case of the other. I hope that fucking asshole executive fucking gets hit with a 6 figure judgement.
Nope, sorry, not the fault of "misogynerds" like me. Not my fault I was born with a clitoris that was a centimeter too large. Go to hell. All of you SJWs can go to hell. Or at least, I don't care. See the username. The first chance I get, the first moment it's financially feasible for me, I am done with tech. Fuck tech. Fuck you. Fuck SJWs. And fuck gaslighting asshole managers.
Hey, just come out of the closet; there's no shame in being gay. And stop trying to make yourself look smarter by belittling women - it doesn't work.
It probably can't, say true. Help me out here, Ms. Crates! I am trying to answer one question: WHY?!
Don't get me wrong. I had a hand in mentoring both, but in the end one was just flat out turned off to tech by a sexually harassing manager, and the other is a better hacker than I am at this point. She mentored me in how to do Javascript correctly (yes, it can be done correctly, amazingly enough--in the end we'd almost implemented actual object oriented class inheritance in javascript!, but that's a story for another day).
At the same time, I stand accused of sexism. I stand accused of rape. Yet nobody can name just who I raped! Nobody can tell me exactly how I'm involved in this massive conspiracy to keep women out of tech.
As far as I can tell, here's the nature of the vast conspiracy: acceptance of complete incompetence of male "developers" (read: javascript/ruby/systemd cowboys) and complete rejection of women who actually know what the fuck they're doing. Place the blame on "misogynerds" like me (don't hate me because I have better luck with men than TERFs) and bingo! A winner!
What I can see from here is that there are fairly useless initiatives such as Canonical's that do absolutely nothing to increase diversity in tech. Then you have TERFs (granted, that's a new term for me, since what's been happening has been happening long before I registered the current UID) out there who blame me personally instead of the asshole managers actually responsible for the fact there are no women in tech.
Who the fuck is doing anything about all the internalized misogyny I see? NOBODY. NOTHING. Sure, just blame me. I'll go away. You still won't have any women in tech. In fact, one less. So make that three women I know personally who have been chased out of tech by this bullshit.
WHY?!
So many generalisations. You're not a very logical person, are you?
Eh, probably not anymore.
Where is the logic to be found here? I tried to proceed logically, say true. I told women who thought computers were for boys, "You're wrong. Women can be programmers, too!" What did it get me? "ur an asshole!" That's what it got me. "ur sexist." Again, that's what it got me.
There is no logic to be found here. If there were any logic, some feminist would have helped me transition--and I'd be living as a woman today with some hope of a normal life--instead of calling me a quantum rapist (i.e. not even I can know whether I'm a rapist or not because the waveform can only collapse into one state: the observation, i.e. catching me in the act, that I am a rapist no matter what I believe or say or think or feel).
Nope, no logic whatsoever. WHY must the blame fall on me for the lack of female programmers instead of the asshole managers? Who is going after the asshole managers who are actually responsible? Who is using their cis-ness to help convince women that maths aren't hard?! I sure as hell can't help out there! I'm just a metaphysical rapist, somebody to be injected with testosterone against her will!
I'm not the one out there telling girls that maths are hard! I'm not the one turning women off to tech and science. So yeah, pretty much fuck everything until people are willing to come around and see the truth. You can blame me all you want, but it's not going to magically produce more women programmers.
So yeah, call me a misogynist. Makes no difference in the end. Have fun with your self-fulfilling prophecies.
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."
If being gay is OK, then it's hardly a slander? But it is not uncommon for gays, who have yet to come out, to harbour rather cramped views on things like women, politics or being gay, to name but a few. And when you seem to be really quite misogynistic in your pronouncements, then it is not unreasonable to guess that you have reasons for favouring men - being gay is one such reason. But most gay men I know, don't feel hostile to women - it isn't a very wild guess to suspect that you don't feel good about yourself, since you seem to have a need to try to put half of the human population down. And if my chain of reasoning is correct, then the best way to get to feel better is to come out and be what is natural for you.
You're correct. I haven't been clear. I got triggered.
(Granted, shoehorning class inheritance into Javascript was fun but fundamentally flawed. Still, an interesting exercise.)
I live in a world where, apparently, Ada Lovelace is evidence of my sexism. I wasn't assigned the same gender as her at birth, so therefore, because I chose (even though the warnings should have been clear it was a poor choice) to learn programming, I'm a fucking sexist, end of story. Hey, I was a kid at the time. I didn't understand the complete insanity and gender lunacy that would become programming.
What about Rear Admiral Hopper? Do her accomplishments amount to jack shit? Apparently.
What about Lovelace's work in advancing women in science in general? Nope. Again, jack shit.
Hypatia got a mention up there. She must have been a fantastic individual to accomplish becoming the head librarian of the fucking Library of Alexandria despite the attitudes about women that must have persisted at the time! Granted, she might have been an Amazon, who knows. My alter ego at the red site would probably make up something in regards to that.
Do the SJWs even understand what was in Lovelace's Notes? I doubt it. The ones who have accused me of sexism to my face certainly didn't.
Curie. Tubman. Many others we're leaving out. Yet, Lovelace. Why Lovelace? Why is Lovelace even a trigger for me? Why did I get accused of sexism because I wasn't assigned the same gender at birth, even though I fucking should have?! What the fuck does gender have to do with any of this?
But whatever. This is a man's world, not because it should be, but because the SJWs like it that way. That way we can magnify some rich bitch who lived 150 some odd years ago larger than life just to build the FEEL GUILTY narrative. FEEL GUILTY!
Somebody hook a generator up to Lovelace's spinning corpse. This is certainly not what she indented. If she were alive today, she would be accused of not being a "real" woman and of being a traitor to her own gender. Why? Because if an SJW spent 5 minutes talking to her, they would realize how mentally deficient they are. Then would come the usual accusations. Because womanhood is only one thing, can possibly be only one thing, and we'll beat into submission anyone, cis or trans, that doesn't fit that mold. Womanhood is victimhood! Or at least it is according to man's world.
Why? For the same reason we've got somebody up there pointing out that the important attribute of Lovelace is that she had some kids! I mean, WTF?! FEEL GUILTY, YOU ARE NOT WORTHY OF THE LOVELACE YOU SEXIST! There are many "cisgendered" women who can't have children. Modern medical science is solving those problems one-by-one. You might have remembered one woman who was in the news because she was able to give birth thanks to her mother's uterus being implanted in her. Was she a mentally ill, sexually confused person until she had that procedure? Is the definition of a woman limited to those who have babies? Help me out here.
I don't know. There are two women I know (not me) who need programming jobs. Until that's resolved, any fucking invocation of Lovelace as evidence of sexism is null and void. Any fucking blame directed at me personally for some vast conspiracy of misogynerds keeping women out of programming jobs and go fuck itself. I report asshole sociopath psychologically manipulating managers for sexual harassment when it happens. Do you? I encourage women who have been discriminated against, even if they don't realize it themselves, to file lawsuits. Do you?
I feel I'm the only person actually doing something about the problem with gender diversity in programming. But it's not good enough. Nothing I do ever will be good enough, because I'm not a woman, and so therefore I will always either be a sexist or metaphysical rapist or some other fucking excuse for WHY my efforts will never be good enough, why I
Why are these things mutually exclusive? We had plenty of smart people who were off the rocker in more recent time - think John Nash or Van Gogh. Babbage himself must have come across as a mad scientist at the time - spending all the money on hundreds of gears and muttering about building a machine than can think. It probably took a person who didn't care much about social norms to associate with him publicly.
Even if she had a lot of help and training from Babbage to publish her book, she was still plenty smart to put all the ideas together. Apparently, she was making serious plans to make a flying machine while in her teens and studied many different materials for wings. That's like someone trying to build a mission to marks in their backyard in this day and age and worth respect for the guts all by itself.
And why not? This is a belief held widely throughout the world. I think you're just being racist towards your instructor and can't handle the fact that a strong female authority figure told you something that you disagree with.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
Who is then? Her writings seem the closest to what we consider "programming". Iteration, conditionals, and (of course) function calls have existed before that time, but her writings are the first that targeted an actual Turing-Complete computing machine, that I know of, rather than just abstract steps.
Table-ized A.I.
Babbage taught her how to do it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yup thx
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
As another post said, why couldn't she be both? And in fact, she sort of was both -- though perhaps not really a "genius" nor exactly a "fraud."
Ada comes out looking really good. She was not a fraud, and she did understand what she was doing.
Yeah, she comes out looking a little TOO good. Wolfram was pretty fair, but he didn't really get into the more controversial stuff and the reasons why many historians say she is massively overrated. She wasn't a fraud, but she is often given too much credit for work that was derivative or which was likely developed together with Babbage.
Wolfram is not a historian, and unfortunately you can see some of the problems when you just go digging through the primary sources. There are lots of things that may be influencing the way things "look" in those documents, mostly prominently the issue of social class. For example, much is sometimes made of her correspondence with Michael Faraday, and his apparent admiration (or at least approval) of her. But Faraday was from a lower-class background, and in the strict class-based structures of the time, it would potentially be useful for him to "be on the good side" of a noblewoman. I'm not saying Faraday "lied": I'm just saying he had a motivation to try to cultivate patrons and thus be a bit flattering to aristocrats.
There are other such issues that are important in interpreting the kind of relationships implied by the documents and what they mean about Ada Lovelace's roles and contributions. And frankly Wolfram just seems to be missing a lot of historical perspective. He makes a big deal out of Lovelace's seemingly poetic evocation of weaving and Jacquard punch cards (citing two quotations), but this wasn't poetry and musings about the "fabric of algebra" in some philosophical universe -- it was a practical mechanical connection to previous technology. And later he implies Lovelace was forward-thinking because she imagined possible larger applications for such programming, as in:
Ada seems to have understood, though, that the "science of operations" implemented by the engine would not only apply to traditional mathematical operations. For example, she notes that if "the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony" were amenable to abstract operations, then the engine could use them to "compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent". Not a bad level of understanding for 1843.
Actually, it was a pretty old idea by that time. The science of harmony goes back to the Greeks, mathematicians had been trying to use math algorithms to generate pieces of music since the 1600s, Athanasius Kircher (ahem) had actually produced a device to generate musical compositions automatically by 1650 (it had a bunch of wooden pieces with mathematical tables written on them, which could be rapidly arranged and then translated into pieces of music), and the 1700s saw numerous attempts to continue this line of reasoning further and to propose various mathematical attempts at musical composition.
So yeah, this is a fun idea, but it was hardly an original one at that time. Same goes for a lot of stuff Wolfram brings up.
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.
No, but you might actually claim that she was the first debugger. She may or may not have been instrumental in developing a serious set of "programming instructions" to solve a major problem -- but even Babbage admits that she found a major error in his proposed algorithm.
And she was important in trying
Without denying your major points, I still think Wolfram managed to get to the core of who Ada was: an intelligent, motivated intellectual who managed to get herself to the fore of the field of mathematics. She was starting to have insights that you would expect to see from an advanced student, and if she had lived, she probably would have made real contributions to the field.
Also, I thought the OP was interesting because it delved into the Mechanical Notation Babbage used, and discussed how it enabled him to design his machines...
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We don't really know that. He taught her how his machine worked, but he was not particularly good at describing how it did actual computations on paper it seems, mixing up mechanical ideas with abstract computation ideas.
It appears they had a back and forth dialog on how to better articulate what it does, and she was the better documentor. Whether that's the first "programmer" or "programming manual writer" is a relatively minor distinction.
She essentially wrote, "Analytical Engine Unleashed" with feedback from Charles.
We don't have all the details of their correspondence, but it appears she viewed the machine in more abstract and practical terms than Charles, in part in order to better promote it. His head was more "in the gears" based on his actual writings.
Perhaps a rough analogy would be that Charles was Steve Wozniak and Ada was Steve Jobs. Jobs "sold" the vision of personal computers, while Ada "sold" the idea of an actual general purpose computer.
It's fairly safe to say that she was the first to document practical programming and uses of a general purpose physical computer.
Table-ized A.I.
Whether that's the first "programmer" or "programming manual writer" is a relatively minor distinction.
I think that's a fairly large distinction lol. Anyway, she was translating an article written by someone else (although she added a large section of notes to it).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The key is then how important her additions were. It's my understanding that the original gave few if any explicit examples.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Anyway, if you want to call her 'first', I don't really care lol. We can spend decades arguing about the precise definition of 'first' and it still won't matter.
What matters is who she was, and what she did, and I think the article does a good job assessing that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Er, where does racism come into this? Did you just grab the wrong card from your stack of SJW talking points?
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.
It appears she's more than a documenter, she probably was the first to formulate and author concrete examples of digital computer programming (for a general purpose computer), or at least heavily contributed to it. Nobody is claiming Ada invented a computer.
(By "digital" I mean it's based on discrete values, contrasting with say the ancient Greeks "rope programs" for automating puppet shows.)
Table-ized A.I.
Small nit to pick. The rope puppet shows were from Heron. Yes, Heron was a Greek and his goods did end up in Greece. However, he is fully titled as Heron of Alexandria. It was there, in the library (which was more than a library like we have today), where he worked and spent his time learning. Attributing his work to the Greeks is a bit misleading. I don't think we're even positive that he was born in Greece but I'm unsure of which historian was discussing that and where.
It should, of course, be noted that the territory in question, Alexandria, was not necessarily not-Grecian in many ways at the time. It does bear the name of Alexander for a reason, after all. Many, if not most, of his works were for Egyptian temples. There are a few, not enough, documentaries on his life and inventions.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Wow, i've never heard that one before. I make a statement the SJW's dont like and its because you think I'm in the closet. How novel! I suspect you are the gay one or british, same difference, lol.
We live and learn :-) Enlighten me, what is an SJW?
Still, I have trouble understanding why it is that some men are misogynists - so I try to make some wild guesses. Perhaps you have a better explanation? I am indeed British - not gay. I know, it's hard to tell the difference, but the slightly pained expression and awkward gait has another explanation: The Tory Government, who have a preference for, shall we say, approaching us from behind.