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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"...
The dictionary definition does not specifically say one must exhibit all three characteristics to be e hero. Strength of character. Strength of the mind. Courage to take a path less travelled. Courage to explore a field of knowledge in which you might not represent to majority. There are plenty of interpretations. It is not restricted to brutality on the battlefield nor the sports venue.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hero says for example the following: "a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities." -- To avoid those who love to nitpick about things let's substitute "hero" with "heroine" and "man" with "woman" here and look at the rest of the definition: a heroine is basically someone who has achieved something particularly noteworthy and possibly challenging, not done something that put them or others in danger or required great physical strength. The challenge may be intellectual or mental, like e.g. a social or physics problem, instead of a huge dragon, and the strength drawn accordingly from one's brains instead of brawn.
Einstein is definitely considered a great hero in scientific circles, but did he put himself in some sort of great danger when writing down his theories? Did it require him great physical strength?
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?
Huh? Citations, please... Could you name a few women from Ada's society, who lost their social positions?
Though Ada's father was an asshole (like many poets), her mother was a freaking baroness — and "independently wealthy". And it was her mother, who promoted little Ada's interest in Mathematics.
If you want to find an actual hero among women-scientists, that would by Hypatia, but Ada Lovelace has done nothing exceptionally heroic. Good for her, because her times didn't require such things from her.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Nonsense and bullshit. Wikipedia cites her biography thus, for example (emphasis mine):
Somebody lied to you, honey. The "Victorian Britain", however much it is hated by the "progressive" teachers of yours, was not as bad as they were telling you.
She happily married later and had three children with a loving husband.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And these travails of a sexually confused person have what to do with Ada Lovelace? You do know, she happily married and had three children?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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."
I'm afraid you're the one who is sexually confused. When you see me, you believe I am a woman. Who told you that? I didn't. In fact, I'm surprised when I'm even clearly dressed as a man when you call me "ma'am." Then when you see on my papers that I was assigned the male gender, you'd probably freak the fuck out and blame me for the way you gendered me. But anyway, I digress. Not my problem your image of a trans woman is a man in a dress.
Back on topic. Random trivia: Lovelace also died from uterine cancer at an unfortunately young age.
Yes, different people have different body parts. Biology is messy. Deal with it.
Actually, I'm surprised that Lovelace is idolized as a woman programmer when she had better accomplishments advancing women in the field of science. No love for Rear Admiral Hopper, who designed the first compiler? What about Liskov and her theories?
Nope. We have to go full retard and blame the programming languages themselves. Obviously, Rear Admiral Hopper and Liskov weren't aware that they were promoting sexism by putting forward things like syntax errors and type theories. You sexist cow, Liskov! Putting things into types and objectifying them means you're a part of the vast conspiracy of foisting the patriarchy on women and keeping them out of programming careers!
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
Engaging in an activity typically pursued by men and risking the wrath of the sperglords for doing so?
Nonsense and bullshit. Wikipedia cites her biography thus, for example (emphasis mine):
She was presented at Court at the age of seventeen "and became a popular belle of the season" in part because of her "brilliant mind."
Somebody lied to you, honey. The "Victorian Britain", however much it is hated by the "progressive" teachers of yours, was not as bad as they were telling you.
Actually, you're really overstating your case. And you're overlooking important hints about what was really going on here. She was admired for her "brilliant mind" not just as a woman, but because she was presented at Court.
She wasn't just a woman -- she was a rich, aristocratic woman who thus had a bit more freedom to do things she wanted to without raising as many eyebrows. But keep in mind that there were still severe restrictions even on noblewomen -- during her lifetime (1830s), Parliament confirmed that women absolutely did NOT have the right to vote, they were basically unable to get a divorce without applying for an individual Act of Parliament to do so, when married their property rights generally didn't exist individually (this was typical of marriage laws back then), etc., etc. You might benefit from reading a bit of the history of feminism in the UK to get a better sense of how restricted women were at this time.
Sure, educated women in the upper classes were allowed to pursue various intellectual pursuits, basically as long as they weren't seen as having any serious practical consequence. If Ada Lovelace wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor or something like that, she would have faced HUGE obstacles. If she wanted to be taken seriously as a scholar and employed as a professor at a major university, it would have taken serious convincing.
But if she -- as a wealthy lady who supposedly had nothing better to do with her time -- spent time fiddling with random gadgets that weren't understood to have any practical purpose as yet and working with some theoretical mathematics that wasn't really groundbreaking (it was the connection to technology which was novel, not the math itself), then she wouldn't be "stepping on the toes" of any men in any serious practical professions.
So, GP's claim was a bit nonsensical, because wealthy aristocratic women did have freedom to pursue intellectual pursuits to some extent. But your response is equally nonsensical in acting like "Victorian Britain" wasn't that bad for women. For women of the lower and middle classes, they certainly wouldn't have had the option to do anything like this. And for upper-class women, this sort of thing was pretty much limited to women who essentially took on the status of "independent scholars" and were generally admired FIRST for their wealth and social standing. But they could participate in intellectual discourse to some extent, as long as they mostly confined themselves to theoretical works without demanding actual recognition or a practical career.
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.
False. She was presented at Court, because she was a girl of noble birth coming of age — all such teenagers were presented at Court, whether they were dumb or smart, or strong or weak.
She fought none of these restrictions and so is no "hero" on that account. Her intellectual pursuits do her credit, but, because these required no risks are not signs of any heroism either.
Every woman in 19th century had the necessary freedoms for such pursuits. Being wealthy and well-connected provided the means, but not the freedoms.
You just agreed, that it was not as bad as the GGP made it appear, and yet, you are calling my response equally nonsensical? Wow...
Not because they lacked freedoms — only because they didn't have the wealth. A very important distinction, when judging a culture.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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
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.
Er, where does racism come into this? Did you just grab the wrong card from your stack of SJW talking points?
Bullshit. The two words are synonyms — the latter was thought up simply to be able to have a conversation about certain matters without the younger part of those present giggling at the former. Says the dictionary:
People with a mismatch of these two are not well. Abnormal. Up until a few years ago one could be expected to be generous and humour them so as not to hurt their feelings, but their more recent antics require a pushback of some kind.
A person calling himself a cat or Napoleon is universally understood as needing treatment. Why should we view a woman calling herself a man — or the other way around — any differently?
In a few years, medicine and biology may allow us to extend our necks or grow tails — will we see more confused people demanding, they be called giraffes on pain of being denounced as speciist bigots?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.