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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.
Why haven't Alice and Bob been replaced with Ada and Babbage yet?
*sigh*
The difference engine. Really? Seriously?
Repeat after me: Ada Lovelace wrote a program for the Analytical Engine architecture.
I'm sure Babbage's Difference Engine is fascinating, but it can't be programmed. The architecture you're looking for is the Analytical Engine. At least get the basics right.
Here: A Sketch of the Analytical Engine. It has never actually been built, although I understand one of the mills almost was.
The woman page. (That's a joke, son.)
And finally, the table of contents in case I've missed something in my nerd rage.
*sigh*
The difference engine. Really? Seriously?
Repeat after me: Ada Lovelace wrote a program for the Analytical Engine architecture.
I'm sure Babbage's Difference Engine is fascinating, but it can't be programmed. The architecture you're looking for is the Analytical Engine. At least get the basics right.
Here: A Sketch of the Analytical Engine. It has never actually been built, although I understand one of the mills almost was.
The woman page. (That's a joke, son.)
And finally, the table of contents in case I've missed something in my nerd rage.
In fairness, you can't go to see an Analytical Engine reconstruction., because there isn't one. So the best you can do is the Difference Engine, which, as you correctly point out, Ada had nothing to do with. It's still worth seeing. And it's in Mountain View, not Santa Clara...sorry, about that.
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."
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)