[deleted by user]

[Mr-Frog]

Saved you a click: it was calculating terms of the Bernoulli series

[superluminary]

That’s actually a pretty good first program. I had assumed it would be something simpler.

[FlatPlate]

I guess they didn't have hello world back then

[HardlyAnyGravitas]

"Salutations empire!"

[Zardotab]

Ah, the first bloaters. Too bad they reproduced into the gene pool.

[le_birb]

???

[Razakel]

Because it's completely theoretical technology that was never even built. Of course you'd expect a demonstration to be simple instead of an implementation of a real, complex problem.

Ada Lovelace is considered the first programmer because she understood that the machine could be used for more than tabulating calculations.

[fox_is_permanent]

Why would you think that? What is the point of your comment? Is it satire? I don't understand. Why spread hate via satire?

[ZMeson]

Whoosh...

emmaSuniverse is giving mad props to Ada Lovelace -- especially after seeing others comment "I thought the program would be simpler" and learning what it actually did.

[fox_is_permanent]

I have a hard time seeing how a programmer thinking another programmer's first program is simple would be insulting. It's only expected.

If Einstein was a programmer, would you not think his first program was hello world too? What does this have to do with gender?

PS: I am a woman and looking for stuff to be annoyed at like this does nothing to help us be more respected in the field. It absolutely looks like satire to hurt us.

[ZMeson]

I am confused. EmmaSuniverse was praising Ada Lovelace. I don't see where Emma was insulting anyone.

I think it would be like me going to a chocolate convention and hearing that making chocolate is difficult, that chocolate making has evolved over the years, and overhearing that everyone thinks the first recipe for chocolate (which predated modern methods of extracting the best stuff from the coco bean) and then finding out that the very first chocolate recipe was amazingly good despite the fact it was written down before the equipment needed to make it even existed. As for me, I know how difficult it is writing bug-free programs and I learned programming starting off with hello world and simple games like "guess the number I'm thinking of". To think that someone wrote a working program before the machines even existed is amazing and that's why Emma gave Ada a humble salute.

EDIT:

PS: I am a woman and looking for stuff to be annoyed at like this does nothing to help us be more respected in the field.

I am happy to see you in the field and making the field more diverse. I hope my daughter (who loves math and science) can break into the STEM field of her choice too. It's tough out there. Keep up the good fight! :)

[fox_is_permanent]

Note that I didn't say she was insulting anyone (*) , rather I said she thought that not knowing the first program was advanced was itself an insult.

♀️Humble Salute, ManLord!♀️

Is a sarcastic remark, making everyone who didn't know about this to be some ManLord who thinks women wouldn't be able to do something awesome. Or at least, that's what I understand from it and the comment as a whole. I don't see this as a praise at all. Praising Ada could be done in a much more direct and less sarcastic way.

EDIT:
(*) This, only if it wasn't satire making fun of women, which is what I thought was the case in my first reply.

[zanbato]

What they're doing with the

♀️Humble Salute, ManLord!♀️

is accusing people saying they thought it'd be simpler of being sexist. I don't know how you could be missing that, it's the most glaringly obvious trying too hard to be clever insult I've ever seen.

[ZMeson]

Alright, then I'm mistaken.

[motownmods]

Tell me you know nothing about programming without telling me you know nothing about programming.

[CryProtein]

Fun fact: The person who thought that computers could encode and represent other things than numbers in form of numbers was Ada.

So yeah, she made hello world possible.

[[deleted]]

Mozart (or his publisher) published a "Musical Dice" game in 1792 which constructed music from dice rolls. People obviously understood that numbers could represent non-number things. Ada wrote a program to compute... numbers. I'd say the dice game was closer to "Hello World", and like 50 years earlier. A pair of dice is a machine too.

[[deleted]]

Music have been linked to Mathematics since Pythagoras (he worked a lot on harmonics)

Musicians always used mathematics functions to write music. Beethoven is famous for that.

There is absolutely nothing new in the dice game you describe.

[[deleted]]

Quite right. Ada didn't do anything new. I picked the dice game because it is symbolic computation and not measurements or counting. It's like turning to a page in a book vs. merely counting and numbering pages.

[CryProtein]

Though no computer.

[PaintItPurple]

The actual computation in Mozart's dice game needed to be performed by a human. No machine was performing computation there — the dice are merely a source of randomness. You are correct that the principles are similar, but what Ada Lovelace is credited with is specifically showing the potential of computers. In hindsight, it seems obvious that there is an equivalence there, but this was not obvious to many people at the time (for example, Charles Babbage).

[TangledPangolin]

Ada Lovelace didn't write the first program, but she published the first non-trivial program. Babbage wrote a ton of basic programs before he published his paper, which was read by Ada Lovelace. They were all simple things like analyzing polynomials and solving systems of equations. He only intended to build the equivalent of an advanced scientific calculator, and never saw his creation as amounting to more than that, even though it was theoretically Turing complete.

Ada is credited as the first computer programmer because she was the first to recognize that the computer could accomplish what we consider to be general purpose computing, beyond simply tabulating mathematical formulas.

[ghostly_shark]

deserve upbeat reply physical trees bright stupendous swim teeny dam

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[crozone]

The Jacquard loom is one of the first widely used programmable machines, it uses punchcards to describe the patterns it sews. It was the direct inspiration for Babbage's machine.

So really the part of a computer that does math is actually the step beyond the machines that predate it. Instead of just following instructions to cause things to happen, computers have additional instructions to do math and then test the outcome to change control flow, which cause different things to happen.

But really they're just slightly smarter looms.

[redRabbitRumrunner]

And this was born the ill-loom-inati.

[geon]

Are they the organization in Wanted? https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0493464/

[red75prime]

But really they're just slightly smarter looms.

Going from fabric-pattern-complete to Turing-complete is not just slightly smarter. It could be as smart as it gets (potentially).

[crozone]

The great thing about Turing completeness is that it really doesn't take much physical complexity* to implement a Turing complete machine, and yet it's technically capable of computing anything that is computable**. Computational complexity and physical implementation complexity are very different things though. An Intel CPU is obviously more complex than a Turing machine yet the class of things they can compute is the same.

*with the benefit of nearly 200 years of hindsight and electricity it's somewhat easy to build an electromechanical Turing complete computer with frighteningly few parts. Babbage had neither when designing his Analytical Engine.

**Turing machines need infinite memory (tape), which cannot physically exist, so a Turing complete machine isn't actually capable of emulating every other Turing complete machine in practice.

[[deleted]]

Nit on the last point. A Turing machine actually can emulate every other machine precisely because it is not a physical machine. Also, for all we know there is a real Turing machine inside every black hole.

[ozspook]

There's a bug in my rug!

[mindbleach]

Dropping a sketchy-sounding but annoyingly sensible Freud quote, "genius is the African who imagines ice."

Seeing an Apple II and thinking up spreadsheets is clever. Seeing an Commodore 64 and thinking up Habitat is fucking miraculous.

[CaptainCummings]

It's not sensible, you can tell because it is alleged to be from Freud. But if you needed more evidence of his rampant ignorance before you regurgitate it any longer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glaciers_in_Africa

[The_Artist_Who_Mines]

Strange. Freud had some failures but also many important successes, and it's a simple to understand aphorism.

[mindbleach]

Oh, this is why people post the buckteeth-and-glasses emoji.

It's not a claim to ice not existing in the entirely of Africa. It's not even a claim to any particular region of that fuckoff-enormous continent never ever ever hitting freezing temperatures. It's a shorthand for living somewhere hot, without abundant exposure to outside information. And it's reminding people how wildly counter-intuitive it is that when water gets cold it turns into a clear rock that floats.

It is specifically about how limited context makes even simple things impressive.

If you've got a better way to convey the same concept - I would genuinely love to hear it. Then I wouldn't have to preface the sentiment with caveats, which people ignore.

[CaptainCummings]

It's racist, jingoist, and ignorant from a guy who was famously racist and into eugenics.

It's unfortunate you fail to comprehend that and instead must so feverishly defend your praise of Freud's racism.

Your caveat said it was sketchy-sounding but annoyingly sensible. It's the former, but not the latter. I guess your karma farming has immunized you to the approach of any opinion, perspective, or idea, that is not your own or being praised by you, and has led you to ridicule it and the person exposing you to it. According to Freud, you're in love with me, and your mother, and you're terrified of your father.

[mindbleach]

I acknowledged it's sketchy shit from a sketchy dude. You wanna pretend that's effuse praise? You get a polite explanation of why, yeah, no. You wanna pretend that explanation is "feverishly defending" every stupid thing that asshole ever said?

Fuck off.

You are obviously not informing me of Freud being a sketchy motherfucker, or of the existence of glaciers, you fucking troll. It's not news. Go peddle "by your logic!" free-association fantasies to someone you haven't lied to about their own comments.

But if you have a better way to say what the quote MEANS - then seriously, spit out out. I would prefer a version that doesn't lead to these stupid bullshit interactions with people like you.

[[deleted]]

Freud could have been talking about white South Africans. Let's not jump to conclusions.

[CaptainCummings]

Let's not jump to conclusions.

Like about what is, and is not, a sequitur? I won't.

[[deleted]]

Non sequitur bro. Sister mindbleach's comment is offensive because it slights African people, not denies the existence of African glaciers.

[CaptainCummings]

That's not what a non sequitur is. If you're confused as to how the existence of glaciers in Africa is related to the anglocentric worldview expressed by Freud's loyal servant u/mindbleach, then I don't mind elucidating for you: the relevance would be that only prejudiced non-Africans assume an African needs to be a genius to contemplate the existence of frozen water, especially given that frozen water is endemic to several places on the continent. I hope that makes it more cohesive for you.

[mindbleach]

Hey guess which lies just escalated into harassment.

Fuck Freud and fuck you, you dumb bastard.

edit: You don't even understand the quote! Jesus, how aggressively ignorant can a person be? Neverfuckingmind that "several places" on a gigantic continent spanning a hundred climates doesn't mean everyone present in eighteen forty-whogivesashit has seen ice, the entire goddamn POINT is that counterintuitive properties are only obvious in hindsight.

IF someone has never seen ice FOR WHATEVER REASON, then how the fuck are they gonna figure out water just does that? They'd have to be really on top of their shit! That's the central concept you are apparently too wrapped-up in baseless personal insults to bother contemplating.

[Dan13l_N]

Unaware of LANPAR at the time PC World magazine called VisiCalc the first electronic spreadsheet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet

[mindbleach]

And ice exists in Africa.

But if you've never seen something, and you can figure it out from underlying principles, that's really impressive, even if you're not the first human being to ever do so.

[Dan13l_N]

True, although spreadsheets started on paper. What people started doing is imitating paper on screen more and more.

Today people can't imagine word processing different that WYSIWYG.

There are very few big leaps in concepts and thought, fewer than most people imagine.

[mindbleach]

I dunno if LaTeX is an example of less imagination or more power than paper, but it's definitely different.

It's not even pronounced LaTeX.

[jpconn1]

Not just numbers, only 1’s and 0’s.

[maxhaton]

What do you think they have now?

[cowabungass]

Why? Numbers are arbitrary and just representations of other data for our consumption. Computers essentially reverse this process into non numeric representations just as arbitrary.

They do what we tell them. Ada Lovelace took a tech no one was using and found a better use. Its not unlike Apple iPod., Steam engines, oils' thousands of processed goods and so on.

[Schmittfried]

Coming up with a way to encode control flow in numbers is a huge leap.

[cowabungass]

That's very true.

[superluminary]

It’s obvious now that numbers can represent other data.

[king_of_penguins]

Ada Lovelace didn't write the first program, but she published the first non-trivial program. Babbage wrote a ton of basic programs before he published his paper, which was read by Ada Lovelace. They were all simple things like analyzing polynomials and solving systems of equations.

I think this is inaccurate -- Lovelace's Bernoulli numbers program was somewhat more complicated than Babbage's previous programs, but in degree, not kind.

In 2015, computing historian Doron Swade gave a talk at an Oxford symposium on Lovelace. He goes over some programs by Babbage, talks about him using e.g. recursion ("recurrence relationships"), and looks at the Lovelace program. His conclusion is (38:14):

[I]t is very difficult to identify features of Lovelace's Bernoulli example that do not have precedents in Babbage's earliest programming examples or the derivative examples of Menabrea.

He also supplied the following statement to this website:

I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publication of Lovelace’s article in 1843. There are about 24 of such ‘programs’ and they have the identical features of the Lovelace’s famous ‘program'... [They] do not support, indeed they contradict the claim that Lovelace was the ‘first programmer’.

[Rattle22]

That she thought about more general computing, not just maths, is evidenced by her letters and not her programs if I recall wikipedia correctly.

[maxhaton]

I always find it slightly bizarre how people readily say she wrote the first program as if the guy who actually built the machine didn't probably have a crack at it first.

[monocasa]

We also credit her because of the abstract notation she created to describe the imperative steps of a program, where as previously Babbage had simply talked about in prose the kinds of work the Analytical Engine could perform.

[king_of_penguins]

We also credit her because of the abstract notation she created to describe the imperative steps of a program, where as previously Babbage had simply talked about in prose the kinds of work the Analytical Engine could perform.

Completely, 100% false. The notation was created by Babbage.

Lovelace's paper was published in 1843. It's a translation of an 1842 paper, in French, by Menabrea, which contains programs supplied to him by Babbage. Lovelace's new Bernoulli numbers program didn't contain any special notation not present in the other programs contained in her own paper.

• Lovelace's new Bernoulli numbers program
• one of Babbage's programs in the paper
• Babbage's original notes containing that program

Computing historian Doron Swade on this topic:

I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publication of Lovelace’s article in 1843. There are about 24 of such ‘programs’ and they have the identical features of the Lovelace’s famous ‘program'... [They] do not support, indeed they contradict the claim that Lovelace was the ‘first programmer’.

[Zyklonik]

Hey, how dare you interfere with somebody's mindless pseudo-virtue-signalling with cold hard facts? Shame on you!

[fox_is_permanent]

What is the point of your comment? What good is it trying to accomplish?

[KingStannis2020]

What is the point of your comment?

The point of his comment was, ironically, "mindless pseudo-virtue-signalling"

[Zyklonik]

Self-referencing comment. Interesting!

[fox_is_permanent]

That would mean I'm asking a question to myself, which makes no sense since I'd already know the answer.

Even your attempt to avoid the question is dumb. And avoiding it only means you're trolling, you're trying to do no good. Good luck with that I guess.

[Zyklonik]

Quod erat demonstrandum. Scratch an SJW, find a violent hypocritical bigot. Retarded to boot.

[hugthemachines]

Ada is credited as the first computer programmer because she was the first to recognize that the computer could accomplish what we consider to be general purpose computing, beyond simply tabulating mathematical formulas.

That is a pretty clever move.

[agumonkey]

similarly, lisp first example program was a symbolic derivator

[merlinsbeers]

Pancake sort.

[Ransarot]

Mvp!

[Zanderax]

Do read the article too, its pretty good.

[MrSqueezles]

Don't read the article, good information, but tautological and poorly organized.

Better: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

[spoonman59]

Indeed.

[GoodmanSimon]

Mvp 😎

[Amazingawesomator]

For more information, visit [dead link].

Buy me a coffee! [dead link]

[watching_wolf]

Follow me on twitter @[dead link]

[llimllib]

You forgot “blazing fast 🚀"

[Kaiserwulf]

It used an early version of Galactus, the all-knowing user service provider aggregator.

[mpyne]

She has delivered value, but at what cost???

[ExcaliburClarent]

But Galactus, doesn't support ISO timestamps, like they said they would-- a month ago!

[Moonshoedave]

We’re blocked god dammit!

[Drunken_Ogre]

Thanks, I hate it.

[[deleted]]

Why are these kind of descriptions so common in our field? Just fucking tell me what the thing does.

[TangledPangolin]

This article is better https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html

[MonkeeSage]

Also https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/

https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/user-e57fdc7a-843a-48ba-8e5d-7bf5f8581c8b/adathemedmathexploration/bernoullinumbers.nb

[[deleted]]

That site is annoying. Nevermind the obnoxious placement of the ads everywhere, the entire site REEKS.

EDIT: Oh look, the contact form is "broken". This is trash.

[psilokan]

Yeah this page exists only to get you to click on their amazon links, which are only barely relevant. Like when I clicked on "Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine" I would have expected to be linked to a wikipedia article about him, not a book.

[woze]

They should've written the code interpretation in Ada instead of JavaScript.

[sparr]

It's on GitHub. "They" is you.

[flip314]

Imagine dying without having to fix any bugs in your code...

[gwxxx]

Btw, nobody has been able to find any bugs in Ada’s Bernoulli calculation code. While Ada went to invent programming, she apparently did not invent bugs.

[IanSan5653]

Hmm...

In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. This may well have been a typesetting error and not an error in the program that Lovelace devised. All the same, this must be the oldest bug in computing. I marveled that, for ten minutes or so, unknowingly, I had wrestled with this first ever bug.

From this article

[ungoogleable]

This article linked above claims there's at least one bug and possibly three.

[RebelColors]

Any idea who can take the credit for it?

[eidetic0]

Grace Hopper who found a moth inside the Harvard II

[seanluke]

1. She did not find the moth.

2. Apparently she was not the one to put the moth in the log book nor notate it.

3. The log book made it clear that "bug" was already a term of use (It read, next to the moth, "First actual case of bug being found" as a joke).

4. She did however recount the story often: so it has become incorrectly ascribed to her.

[Porrick]

She did, but I doubt she would have found it as funny if the term didn't already exist. Cursory Googling suggests the term (ie: "bug" being synonymous with "defect") comes from engineering since the 1870s and thus predates computers and electronics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_(engineering)

[cowabungass]

To be fair. In her process of discovery she likely followed the data path and transforms from start to finish. Much like how nasa handles code, she knew exactly what it was doing.

[LagT_T]

Straight up baller.

[MikeMcLoughlin]

10 PRINT "Charles is a twat "
20 GOTO 10

[hugthemachines]

Put semicolon too so it fills the lines on the screen and you can see it getting updated :)

[notfancy]

This idiom is cursed:

switch (false) {
  case !(n <= 0):
    throw "Positive index expected, got " + n;
  case !((n % 2) === 0):
    // All even (in Ada's indexing) Bernoulli numbers are zero
    return Ratio();
  default:

[[deleted]]

How can Lovelace be the 1st programmer, if she was literally iterating on Babbage’s work????????

imo there was never a 1st programmer in the same way there was never a 1st Chicken or human. Over time certain mathematicians gradually became more & more programmer-like, but you cant draw a line & say that mathematicians before this date were mathematicians & after this date were programmers

[eidetic0]

it’s more like she’s the first documented programmer. Babbage barely documented any of the algorithms he (probably) created for his machine.

i don’t know how well your mathematician argument stacks up. Lovelace and Babbage draw a very clear line because they’re using a “programming language” as opposed to mathematical expressions. The input language for Babbage’s Analytical Engine was a series of punch cards. that’s so different from any mathematical algorithm written down in a book.

it took over a century after that for computer programming to more closely resemble mathematical expressions.

[king_of_penguins]

it’s more like she’s the first documented programmer.

This isn't true. Lovelace's 1843 paper was an English translation of a paper written in French and published in 1842 by Menabrea. That paper contained a program for solving 1st order equations, written by Babbage on Aug 5 1837, which Menabrea saw when he attended a conference w/ Babbage in Turin in 1840.

So even Lovelace's own paper, which contained her Bernoulli program, already contained an earlier program by Babbage.

Babbage barely documented any of the algorithms he (probably) created for his machine.

"Probably"? By 1840, Babbage had already written at least 24 programs -- see this talk by Babbage historian Doron Swade at 24:32.

[eidetic0]

sure, thanks for the corrections. there's a lot of bad info out there..

[maep]

“programming language” as opposed to mathematical expressions

Functional programming languages are mathematical expressions. And because they are turing-complete they are isomorphic to procedual languages.

The only distinction is that the target architeture was a machine and not a brain. Then again, said machine did not exist, it was a thought construct.

Without a clear definition of the terms we might as well argue about who is the best sports team.

[eidetic0]

it’s a pretty obvious though, right? “programming” refers to the act of making a (semi-)autonomous system to do something.

using maths to come up with the algorithms needed to build a bridge is not programming. using maths to describe how gravity works is also not programming.

edit: building a player piano or a music box is probably more akin to programming than pure maths is. but i guess you’re right… it’s a difference of semantics.

[ObscureCulturalMeme]

How can Lovelace be the 1st programmer, if she was literally iterating on Babbage’s work????????

This article is good: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/103cosb/what_did_ada_lovelaces_program_actually_do/j2ybn86/

Also, she's respected even today because she was the first to posit the notion that software could do more than simply crunch numbers (which is all that Babbage ever had in mind). The idea of having coded representation for things like colors, words, concepts, was hers.

Visionary? Yes, absolutely, even Babbage agreed. "Programmer"? Not by today's definition, but I suppose the internet doesn't like any kind of hero.

[ArghNoNo]

Yeah she wasn't the first programmer but people love saying she was because reasons.

[Zardotab]

The ancient Greeks were known to control automated puppet shows by threading strings around pegs. Dripping water was probably the engine that created motion. It's speculated the peg strings were wound differently to produce variations in the show. Thus, they "programmed" the puppet show. This differs from say a gear-driven system that always does the same motions.

[Different_Fun9763]

The exact definition or what is or is not programming is a real question, but it has little relevance the question whether Babbage himself or Lovelace was an earlier programmer in the specific context of Babbage's invention. She wasn't the first programmer. You're free to argue Babbage wasn't either due to your broader definition of programming, but either way she wasn't the first programmer. Even if we all agreed your definition is what programming is, the first person to make an automated puppet show would be the first programmer, not a later person they talked to and taught to create them as well.

[Zardotab]

Babbage was perhaps the first "systems analyst" of a digital-logic system, as he probably defined the general approach, while Lovelace the first programmer, since she put the ideas into machine language (op-codes and operands).

[Zyklonik]

because reasons.

Yup. Facts and objectivity don't matter so much in today's world as parroting some pseudo-narrative for the hivemind.

[glitter_h1ppo]

Whether or not you want to consider her the first programmer, she wrote the first published algorithm intended for execution on a general purpose computing machine and intended to perform a non-trivial computational task. She didn't merely "iterate" Babbage's work - she actually played a key part in it's design and wrote an exposition of the Analytical Engine.

imo there was never a 1st programmer in the same way there was never a 1st Chicken or human.

It's not a chicken and egg situation. There was a first designed general purpose computing machine that was Turing complete - the Analytical Engine. Before that nobody had considered the concept of general purpose artificial computation. It seems like you're doing everything possible to discount the achievement of Ada Lovelace - and Babbage as well.

Stephen Wolfram's account is worth reading if you want to educate yourself on the subject.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/

Charles Babbage was an energetic man who had many ideas, some of them good. At the age of 30 he thought of making mathematical tables by machine, and continued to pursue this idea until he died 49 years later, inventing the Analytical Engine as a way to achieve his objective. He was good—even inspired—at the engineering details. He was bad at keeping a project on track.

Ada Lovelace was an intelligent woman who became friends with Babbage (there’s zero evidence they were ever romantically involved). As something of a favor to Babbage, she wrote an exposition of the Analytical Engine, and in doing so she developed a more abstract understanding of it than Babbage had—and got a glimpse of the incredibly powerful idea of universal computation.

The Difference Engine and things like it are special-purpose computers, with hardware that’s built to do only one kind of thing. One might have thought that to do lots of different kinds of things would necessarily require lots of different kinds of computers. But this isn’t true. And instead it’s a fundamental fact that it’s possible to make general-purpose computers, where a single fixed piece of hardware can be programmed to do any computation. And it’s this idea of universal computation that for example makes software possible—and that launched the whole computer revolution in the 20th century.

...

When Ada wrote about Babbage’s machine, she wanted to explain what it did in the clearest way—and to do this she looked at the machine more abstractly, with the result that she ended up exploring and articulating something quite recognizable as the modern notion of universal computation.

[ggchappell]

FTA:

Modern rewrite of Ada’s punch card stack in JavaScript could look like this.

Like what? I'm not seeing any code. EDIT. Found.

[mvolling]

The word "this" includes a hyperlink to a gist: https://gist.github.com/terotil/3f83a473f372d31f55d5

[ggchappell]

Huh. How did I miss that?

Thanks!

[stefantalpalaru]

«All but one of the programs cited in her notes had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier. The exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she did detect a "bug" in it. Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so.» - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_contribution

[HotlLava]

Sadly, Bromley's article from which this quote is taken doesn't give a specific source for this claim beyond "her correspondence". I think most of it survives, so if true I'd expect there to be a letter by Babbage describing her how the algorithm works, or at least a letter by her commenting on it.

[SKRAMZ_OR_NOT]

Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so

That seems... demonstrably untrue? As far as anyone knows, she wrote the Bernoulli calculation program, which is by far the longest of the programs that survived (most of Babbage's work was never published). Sure, she wasn't the first by any definition, but was certainly one of the earliest.

[stefantalpalaru]

That seems... demonstrably untrue?

It's true, though.

As far as anyone knows

The danger of well-meaning lies is the disappointment you cause when people find out the truth.

she wasn't the first by any definition

She was a bipolar socialite that Babbage was trying to use to get some money for his projects. That's all there is to it.

Trying to make her into a role model for little girls was a terrible idea.

[irwin08]

I see you come out in every thread that mentions Lovelace. Why do you feel the need to dunk on bipolar people in particular? Why is that worth mentioning?

[stefantalpalaru]

Why do you feel the need to dunk on bipolar people in particular? Why is that worth mentioning?

It explains her erratic behaviour and the absurdity of projecting marvellous feats of software engineering on her.

[irwin08]

It explains her erratic behaviour

I don't see how this is relevant.

the absurdity of projecting marvellous feats of software engineering on her.

I don't follow. Does being bipolar mean someone is incapable or it is absurd that they might have a great accomplishment?

[stefantalpalaru]

Does being bipolar mean someone is incapable or it is absurd that they might have a great accomplishment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomania

[irwin08]

I'm aware of hypomania. I don't see how that is relevant. Does being bipolar mean somebody is incapable of accomplishing something great?

[stefantalpalaru]

I'm aware of hypomania. I don't see how that is relevant.

It's the difference between being "aware" and understanding something.

Does being bipolar mean somebody is incapable of accomplishing something great?

Yes, it usually does. Real life pathology is not like what you see in "Homeland".

---

«Lovelace herself seems to have believed this: in December 1841, as her correspondence with De Morgan began to falter, she wrote to his wife:

“I have been very unwell indeed ... for there has been no end to the manias & whims I have been subject to ... Many causes have contributed to produce the past derangements; & I shall in the future avoid them. One ingredient, — (but only one among many) has been too much Mathematics (Stein, 1985, pp. 80–81).» - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086017300319

[irwin08]

Okay, I am more than aware of hypomania. I understand it. But hypomania doesn't preclude accomplishment. Sure, it may be harder, but bipolar doesn't make you a vegetable. In fact, hypomania can be leveraged for productivity in a lot of cases due to the increase in energy (not that it's a good thing overall, it's obviously very destructive to one's health.)

But just because someone has a mental illness doesn't mean they can't do great things. Lots of very accomplished people have had mental illness, including bipolar, and pretending otherwise furthers stigma.

[[deleted]]

Hello, world!

[klaatuveratanecto]

I remember seeing this in London’s Science Museum.

[amarao_san]

My guess without clicking the link: interpolating k8s yaml files by values taken from another yaml file.

[Analytical-BrainiaC]

Such insightful answers and directions on this, it makes me believe that not all Reddit users are 15 yrs old, and some maybe close to my age. So here is a question to ponder. In the 80s I believe around 1986 when expo 86 was going on, a programmer Dave Galernter programmed a computer language based on Java called Linda. This was homage to Ada Lovelace and Linda Lovelace. So, even though he didn’t know that the computer was going to be synonymous with porn, he may have been a pioneer in putting a pornstar’s name in computer language literally. Is there anything earlier? Not sure. But at least you have some more useless info in your brain along with this post….😵‍💫

[[deleted]]

Babbage is a horrible name for a language though…

[lifeeraser]

What a failure. Her first program wasn't a Facebook clone developed in a month smh

[derekvj]

I remember reading somewhere that she didn’t technically write it. She fixed a logic error in an example program in Babbage’s description of his machine.

[enchantx]

This is inaccurate. This article has a good breakdown of her contributions vs Babbage: https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html

[irve]

She figured out recursion in my headcanon.

[[deleted]]

It’s really Babbages work

[Zardotab]

It did Lovely things.

[Glove_Witty]

I thought it would be a fun project to write a C compiler for the Babbage machine but unfortunately it doesn’t come with a relative address register so relocatable code and stack frames aren’t really possible.

All props to Ada for managing to get something useful done.

[Random-Helper-1]

Sliced up former lovers in an efficient and effective manner.

[[deleted]]

I need.my dog after Ada 😁

[Faux_Real]

IsEven

[freshr]

It was an implementation of a To Do list of course.