Slashdot Mirror
America's Former CTO Remembers Historic Coders (bard.edu)
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In her Bard College commencement speech, ex-Google VP and former U.S. CTO Megan Smith revealed to graduates that she gave President Obama a computing history lesson on the same day he learned to code in 2014. "I walked into the Oval Office to do coding with President Obama, and, interestingly, Prince William had just stepped out," Smith explained (YouTube). "They had just had a meeting. I said to President Obama, you know what you and I are about to do is related to Prince William, and he said, how's that. Well, the Prince's wife Kate, her mother and grandmother were codebreakers at Bletchley Park, where they cracked the Nazi Enigma codes...." [Presumably Smith meant to say Kate's great-aunt, not mother — Carole Middleton wasn't born until 1955.]
To be fair to the President, Smith once confessed to not knowing much about computing history herself, explaining in a 2012 Official Google Blog post that she and other visiting tech luminaries were embarrassingly clueless about who Ada Lovelace was in a 2011 visit to England. "Last year, a group of us were lucky enough to visit the U.K. Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, as part of the Silicon Valley Comes to the U.K. initiative," Smith wrote. "While there, we asked about some of the paintings on the wall. When we got to a large portrait of a regally dressed woman, our host said 'and of course, that's Lady Lovelace'... You can imagine our surprise when we learned she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine." One imagines Smith might also have been surprised to learn that many programmers older than Smith were already very aware of Lady Ada at that time thanks to the Department of Defense, who tried in vain to make Ada a household name for decades, but had little success popularizing the Ada programming language, which was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
To be fair to the President, Smith once confessed to not knowing much about computing history herself, explaining in a 2012 Official Google Blog post that she and other visiting tech luminaries were embarrassingly clueless about who Ada Lovelace was in a 2011 visit to England. "Last year, a group of us were lucky enough to visit the U.K. Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, as part of the Silicon Valley Comes to the U.K. initiative," Smith wrote. "While there, we asked about some of the paintings on the wall. When we got to a large portrait of a regally dressed woman, our host said 'and of course, that's Lady Lovelace'... You can imagine our surprise when we learned she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine." One imagines Smith might also have been surprised to learn that many programmers older than Smith were already very aware of Lady Ada at that time thanks to the Department of Defense, who tried in vain to make Ada a household name for decades, but had little success popularizing the Ada programming language, which was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
Andy Hertzfeld
Steve Capp
These two are historic programmers.
I don't know who came up with the event driven architecture, but these two led the way in making it mainstream.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There is no excuse for Googlers to not know computer history. The Computer History Museum is a couple of blocks away from the GooglePlex. Both the GooglePlex and CHM are in buildings that once belonged to Silicon Graphics.
Speaking of Ada Lovelace, the second implementation of Babbage's Difference Engine design #2 was on loan at CHM from 2008 to Jan 2016. Hand cranked, you know.
More like “quick to blame others” for her lack of knowledge.
Here’s what her blog post actually said: ”So much of world history leaves out or minimizes the contributions of women, and so “of course” most of us had no idea who she was.”
Good grief - I went to college in the 80s, and I knew who Ada Lovelace was. How much you want to bet Smith didn’t know about Bletchley Park in 2011, either?
In any case I’m sure Ms. Smith considers herself an expert in the field now, having likely spent several hours reading Wikipedia after her “embarrassingly clueless” European tour.
#DeleteChrome
"America's Former CTO Remembers Historic Coders"
What a heartwarming and deeply touching story!
Please EditorDavid, we need more nostalgia, less nitpicky geekery in our discussions.
...omphaloskepsis often...
10 PRINT "Now I am a coder! Hail to the Chief!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
When the programming trade was appreciated and encouraged people to become Craftsman. Then outsourcing and contracting firms turned everything into churn and burn with real programming never to be seen again nor appreciated despite the fact that it was those people like the folks at DARPA that made all of this possible including Slashdot. Could you imagine what TCP/IP would have been if it were designed by H-1B Visas under corporate contracts?
We'll make great pets
I'm curious. Do any of you know if President Trump has learned to code? And if so, in which language would he work?
Since he's considered by many to be the highest-IQ president ever, I assume this would have been an easy task for him.
I know many very high IQ people who don't know the first thing about coding. Many scientists and college professors don't know even the basics, and some of the ones that do think making a spreadsheet equation is coding.
There's lots of easy tasks that people just don't get around to learning, or who don't find an immediate need for. I don't repair my own vehicle, for instance, even though many of the people at my local hackerspace think nothing of replacing brakes or fixing a blown head gasket.
To them, it's straightforward and anyone can do it. "Howcome you never learned to do this?"
It's the same with other skills like home wiring and plumbing. Many people shy away from doing electronics, while engineers at Hackaday can make complex electronics boards but can't program a microcontroller.
(Programming a microcontroller is easy! Howcome you never learned to do it?)
I grew up helping my dad wire homes professionally, so electronics - even high-voltage electronics (that can kill) - doesn't scare me.
That's also a skill everyone should have - right?
(Home wiring is easy! Howcome you never learned to do it?)
Trump has a lot of life accomplishments, so I don't think calling him down for not having learned coding is a particularly fruitful avenue for insults.
I believe that Lady Lovelace descends directly from George Gordon who we usually call Lord Byron. A bright family indeed !
I've been interested and learning about computer history since the late 70s. Women have always had a place in computing history. No one is forcing feminism here, these are historical people who are very well known and who have had a major influence in areas most programmers are familiar with. If you go back a few decades, women were also well represented in the computing workplace as well.
As for who slashdot is for, it says it there right at the top. "News For Nerds". If you don't know any female nerds then you need to get out of your basement for a bit.
>> CTO Megan Smith revealed ... that she gave President Obama a computing history lesson on the same day he learned to code..
So he learnt to program in maybe half a day? Wow. Here I am, 35 years in, and still pretty sure I don't know everything...
> If you don't know any female nerds then you need to get out of your basement for a bit.
I'm not the AP above and I do in principle agree with you, but even you have to admit that female engineers are pretty thin on the ground, and to me it seems like that's almost entirely by their own choice. At least every company I've ever worked at has gone out of their way to hire and accommodate women engineers (far more than they would do for guys), yet there just aren't (m)any out there.
There used to be a lot more women in computing. My first technical boss was the main sysadmin and a woman, I had plenty of professors who were women, and had a woman PhD advisor. I'm not sure what really changed. I still see plenty of women in higher level software, and when I worked on medical devices there was good representation from women. But in more network oriented embedded systems, hardware or firmware, they're much more rare.
"News For Nerds". If you don't know any female nerds
I had no idea that news for female nerds had to contain women to be interesting to them, but whatever. Anyway, pointing out gross inaccuracies is far from claiming that women didn't have a place in computing history to any reasonable person.
Ezekiel 23:20
Is there any actual evidence that Obama has unusually high IQ? I mean, he clearly was popular and successful, but that is rather different from high IQ.
Where, exactly?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As a student of computers in the late 70s/early 80s I was much more impressed with Grace Hopper and her famous 'nanosecond' (a 12" piece of wire that represented the distance electricity travelled in a nanosecond) and contributions to COBOL, a language that remains in use some 50 years after it's creation, than Ada Lovelace who "programmed" the first non-programmable computer.
Ken
Being led by the hand through a 'coding' exercise by a former google exec does not impart any meaningful insights into computer programming for a sitting President, or for that matter a classroom full of school children using a printed recipe to make a ball 'bounce' on screen.
That Kate Middleton's grandmother and great-aunt, along with thousands of others, worked at Blechtly Hall (sp) while Alan Turing and friends built their special-purpose computer doesn't make everyone that worked there a 'code-breaker'. There were countless people that supported those doing the actual breaking of code, and while their contribution helped, I don't think the security guards, the cafeteria staff, the secretaries, administrators, transcribers, etc would consider themselves code breakers. Over 99% of the workers at Bletchley Park had no idea who Turing was and how he proposed to crack the enigma - most code-breakers were toiling away trying to break enigma manually, without the aid of Turing's machine.
Oh, and can we agree that the term 'coder' is saved for those people that actually can sit down at a computer and, using the language of their choose, write a program without pre-printed instructions to accomplish some task, no matter how trivial?
Walking into a kitchen and following the directions on the side of a frozen burrito doesn't qualify someone as a 'chef', following a code.org 'packet' doesn't make one a coder.
Ken
First, I was talking about Trump. Second, we know Trump has a high IQ because he tells us so.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hmm, it used to be there. You're right, it's just a site for whatever now.
Both are great people, but Ada Lovelace is probably of more interest academically. Babbage had a rough idea of what his machine might be able to do, but Lady Lovelace had idea on how to use it beyond calculations. She spent most of a year translating an Italian scholarly article on the Analytical Engine into English, while including explanatory notes which were much longer than the original paper. These notes described how to program that machine along with a 'program' for computing Bernoulli numbers. The machine was only non-programmable because it didn't exist.
I was also a big fan of Adele Goldberg, who was a co-designer of Smalltalk-80 and who came up with many of the object oriented concepts still in use today, had been president of the ACM for a few years, and was founder and CEO of Parcplace Systems.
I think they officially dropped it one or two owners back.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You'd be amazed at all the things Trump tells you that aren't true yet still somehow help him achieve his objectives. It's almost like the guy knows something about marketing and branding!
He hasn't achieved a single objective that wasn't going to be achieved if he had not become president. Economy, foreign policy, unemployment. If you look at a graph, he's just continuing the trends from the Obama era.
Trump has made a career out of saying he has achieved things that he has not. And dopes like you are lapping it up because he's sufficiently racist to make you comfortable. A reckoning is coming, though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
He lowered my taxes, he lowered my corporation's taxes, he appointed conservative justices, he's locking up illegal migrants, he's withdrawn from TPP and the Paris accords, he's repealed net neutrality and environmental regulations, and best of all, he's annoying the hell out of Europeans, socialists, and progressives. Are you saying those are just continuations of Obama's policies? Who knew!
Are you kidding? As an evil unfeeling capitalist one percenter, the only color I care about is green. As long as my workers polish my monocles quickly and cheaply, I couldn't care less what color their skin is. I do make it a point, however, to discriminate against socialists, fascists, and progressives, no matter how cheap or desperate you are: you people are evil.
Have you ever actually written anything in COBOL? As a computer language It truly sucks. FAR too verbose.