
3 women who radically changed the course of technology - loklaan
http://www.rexsoftware.com/ada/
======
mafribe
Grace Hopper didn't invent the compiler in the sense that we understand the
term now (a semantics preserving translation from a source language to a
target language). What her team did, was to produce a linker, the A-0_System.

It is also wrong to say that Hopper is "largely the reason coders no longer
need to write in ones and zeros". K. Zuse's Plankalkuel [2] is from the 1940s,
and the first high-level programming languages. And formalisms like the lambda
calculus or mu-recursive functions are even older, Turing complete and hardly
based on 0s and 1s.

It's also wrong to say without Lovelace we might not have computers, or indeed
that she was the first programmer. Humans have been working on automata (that
evolved into computers) by making them more powerful, e.g. the Antikythera
mechanism [3]. It's also wrong to say that Lovelace was the first programmer.
As far as one can see from the notes, she helped Babbage write down, and
popularise his ideas.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)

~~~
tomlock
Interestingly, Plankalkuel was predated by Ada Lovelace's notes on calculating
Bernoulli numbers.

Then for Lovelace, lets go back even further. Mathematics itself already
contains the base principles that enable the formalisms of lambda calculus.

Additionally, the Antikythera mechanism was predated by many admittedly more
crude but still important calculating mechanisms like the abacus. So its wrong
to say that those automata would have existed independently.

Its almost as if everyone's work is built upon the work of those before them
and wouldn't be possible otherwise. Does that invalidate their achievement?

~~~
x1798DE
> Its almost as if everyone's work is built upon the work of those before them
> and wouldn't be possible otherwise. Does that invalidate their achievement?

I think that "x wouldn't have happened without y" statements in questions of
scientific discovery are almost always false, at least partially for this
reason.

In some ways it does invalidate their achievement, to the extent that they are
portrayed as being the sole agent of radical change when, in all likelihood,
they are just the person who got there first (and often by a slim margin, as
the history of scientific priority disputes shows).

~~~
lorenzfx
On the other hand, the competition makes their achievement even more valuable
because they were in a race and got there first.

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xorcist
Hedy Lamarr, movie star and mathematician, should be worth a mention. The
story about frequency hopping radios is an unlikely and fascinating read.

~~~
a_imho
Indeed. We had a story about her on a local news site. It was a bit
disingenuous "The actress who invented the wifi", had to look up the patent to
get a less biased picture though.

~~~
deepnet
Lamarr & Antheil invented frequency to help the Allies, so their remotely
steerable torpedoes could not be pwned en route.

One should not fail to mention Antheil, it was a collaboration.

~~~
deepnet
s/ frequency/ frequency hopping/r

------
chx
Why
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Helen_Worsley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Helen_Worsley)
is Beatrice Helen Worsley left out? While Ada Lovelace might have written the
first algorithm Worsley helped to write the first actual program and wrote a
PhD on basically bridging Turing machines and real machines.

~~~
chinathrow
On a list of three, there's allways n-3 left out...

------
toni
Here is the piece[1] where Adele Goldberg explains how she warned Xerox
executives about not giving away the kitchen sink to Steve Jobs (taken from
Robert Cringely's "Triumph of the Ner­ds" documentary)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw#t=453](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw#t=453)

~~~
loklaan
Thanks for the reference, mate!

~~~
toni
No problem! Thanks for the great post.

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MustardTiger
>When we think of innovators of the technology space we largely think of
blokes like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk

No, we most certainly do not. And of course one of the 3 spots is wasted on
the myth of Lovelace, as usual. Don't bother picking someone who actually
mattered.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk_

I wish the cult of personality would go away, and instead of credit going to
an individual we could say, "innovators like Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and
Tesla/SpaceX".

~~~
deepnet
I agree with opposing a cult of leaders getting credit, but replacing it with
corporate credit ?

There is a long unjust tradition of stealing deserved credit from engineers,
employees & research assistants[1].

Sometimes individuals _are_ solely resposible for important ideas and
implementations, credit should be accorded accurately to teams and
individuals.

[1] Jocelyn Bell, discoverer of radio-pulsars, robbed of the Nobel by her
research supervisor, stealing credit for it.

Avoiding personalities should we merely say radio-pulsars were discovered at
Jodrell Bank ? Seems less accurate, IMHO.

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minikites
Related, Emmy Noether was extremely important to modern mathematics:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#Seminal_work_in_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#Seminal_work_in_abstract_algebra)

~~~
deepnet
Indeed. Noether's formilisation of algebra allowed Church & Turing to develop
the lambda-calculus & invent modern programming & computation.

All modern physics stands apon Noether's 1st theorem, that every
differentiable symettry of physical action is conserved.

Not to mention rings.

------
finishingmove
I was hoping to read something in this article that could be used to inspire
today's girls/women who are not programmers, but aspire to be (or have at
least given it some thought). Unfortunately, it's hard to see things like
"genius-level mathematician" and "studied maths religiously for her first
thirty years" having anything other than an off-putting effect. The most
common reaction to this would be, "I'm just not like that. Not everyone was
born to be a programmer..."

------
tomp
Hm... Did Ada Lovelace actually _change_ the course of technology? Or was she
just a genious who was (unfortunately) _way_ ahead of her time and thus unable
to apply her talents in practice (somewhat like Leonardo da Vinci)?

~~~
vanderZwan
From what I understand Babbage would not have achieved what he had without
their collaboration; and I do not mean that in a sexist _" supportive wife-
surrogate to the world's most famous hater of organ grinders"_ kind of way,
but as a full partner in developing cutting edge technology.

~~~
mafribe
From what I understood, Babbage invented his computers himself. Lovelace was
helpful to him because of her high-society connection. He was hoping to
popularise his work and get more funding.

~~~
tomlock
Have a read of the "Notes by the Translator":

[http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html](http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html)

Do you now think Lovelace was only useful to Babbage in the manner you
describe?

~~~
mafribe
Which of the original content is from Babbage, which from Lovelace?

~~~
tomlock
Maybe Julius Caesar was just two women taped together in a Roman Emperor suit?

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deepnet
Margret Hamilton, who made programming an engineering discipline by inventing
system modelling & software testing at NASA, which famously helped save Apollo
11.

~~~
loklaan
I can't say I've read enough about Margaret, but she surely was a foundation
to some of our modern software design principles.

I didn't know about Apollo 11 details involving Hamilton! Cheers.

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leecarraher
Title should be "computing technology". There are many types of technology
(medical and x-rays for diagnosis comes to mind).

