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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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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 is one of those times when I actually RTFMed.
I agree there was self-promotion, but Wolfram has the chops to really digest and understand the Victorian era style and necessarily rough first casting of novel ideas. Plugging through all that documentation couldn't have been easy, and it's not like the guy doesn't have other things to do, so he deserves some kudos in my opinion.
Wolfram may have been serving himself, but he also served Ada and Charles Babbage, and that makes it worth reading.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)