
Ada Lovelace was not the first computer programmer - stesch
http://www.true-equality.net/archive/2010/07/08/ada-lovelace-was-not-the-first-computer-programmer.aspx
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jgrahamc
If I do say so myself, a much better analysis of Ada Lovelace's contribution
is my own blog post "Lovelace's Leap": <http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/lovelaces-
leap.html>

For those, that don't know I run a charity called Plan 28 that is working on
building Babbage's unrealized Analytical Engine: <http://plan28.org/>

The OP confuses the Analytical Engine and Difference Engine and from that I
would guess his grasp of the subject matter isn't deep. To his point that
Babbage wrote programs for the Difference Engine (sic) (I'm sure the OP means
the AE), there are programs in The Science Museum in London on punched cards
waiting to be executed: <http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/program-waits.html> They
were prepared by Babbage.

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178
Came here to say exactly that, thanks for making the case more elaborate than
i would have made it :)

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hng
"He is a libertarian, atheist, _anti-feminist_..." I stopped reading when I
saw his self-description

~~~
TeMPOraL
Is someone's self-labeling as _anti-[insert any politically correct opinion]_
a good reason to dismiss one's argument?

~~~
antihero
No, but he sounds like a complete dickwad. What sort of sane person is against
the notion that women should be equal? I doubt his understanding of feminism
is much deeper than some garbage he read on an MRA site once, and thus it
follows that he's likely to be wrong about a lot of other things due to having
an axe to grind whilst simultaneously being an ignoramus.

I mean look at the description of his YouTube channel:

"What is equality? We in the men's rights movement believe in equality of
opportunity, that as long as the playing field is level then the outcomes
should not matter. _The feminists tend to believe that equality of outcome is
what matters_ , that the columns under men and women must match for there to
be no more sexism. So what really matters at the end of the day is what you
are comparing. Rights or outcomes? This is the foundation of our debate."

So essentially his entire worldview is based on a complete strawman. Skills.

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makomk
It's really irritating how feminists insist that anyone who disagrees with
their very narrow and _totally contradictory_ views of what it means for
"women to be equal" is against equality for women.

~~~
baxrob
It is really irritating how people insist on using the term "feminist" to
refer to a narrow, incoherent media trope.

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juridatenshi
Someone clearly let the straw feminists out of the closet again. HSSSSS!

<http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=341>

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antihero
The first, one of the first, why does it really matter? He's clearly using
this as a platform to attack things that feminists say in order to feel good
about himself.

~~~
cheez
He wants to out modern feminism as a movement based on emotion and propaganda,
not fact.

~~~
baxrob
By firmly planting his argument in emotion and polemical sloganeering ... and
thereby showing the unworkability of this approach to discussion? (Pretty
sophisticated!)

~~~
cheez
Google "feminist math". I thought his argument was emotional but also
referenced enough original sources to be credible.

It is kind of stupid to think Babbage wouldn't have written programs for his
own machine.

That being said, Grace Hopper is one of my heroes. It's like having a black
friend so you can feel free to criticize Obama! Haha.

~~~
baxrob
I googled it. Did you mean the first link? It looks well written and
interesting from the first couple paragraphs.. The whole list? Yeah, I'm
familiar with the topic.

I think the article's author's central premise (to paraphrase: that Ada
Lovelace is a phony promoted by other rank phonies for [unexplained, mostly
inscrutable but surely, somehow base] political and/or emotional warm-fuzzies)
is 110%, really pretty low-grade, claptrap.

Consider the question of Lovelace's role in CS ...

From the perspective of the author of the Ada language[1], call him Jean: he
probably must have had some kind of psychic crush on her, right? Any of us
(males, I mean) might assume.

From the perspective of later 20th century CS historians, who presumably
bestowed the title "first programmer": Babbage was a hardware engineer; of
course he designed the assembly language, in tandem with designing the
machine; but since the dawn of computing, and still today, there exists a
decided, if fuzzy line, between hardware and software "engineers'. And
Lovelace owns the innovation of considering numbers as representations of any
possible discrete item beyond mere numbers (hm, maybe Leibnitz did this
earlier, but that really doesn't count, does it?[2]), which is /key/. So, call
them, respectively, first hardware architect, first software programmer. Fair
enough?

I think we can definitively settle the question with a time machine - I
presume that Charles and Ada would be quite pleased to discuss all such trivia
over tea with an esteemed time-traveller. -- Now you have a new, better
project that trolling HN threads (jk ;-P).

And no, he referenced nowhere near enough original sources to seem even
vaguely credible on such a complex, controversial topic. (See also the first
reply in this thread, from jgrahamc - who does give the sense of having
actually researched the labyrinthian topic.) And yes, Admiral Hopper. What is
with white girls? And how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

No offense.

[1] "Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII
Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD)
from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used
by the DoD." [wikipedia:Ada (programming language)] [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Symbo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Symbolic_thought)

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cheez
No offense taken. I'm just tired of rah rah feminism. It's so boring. Just
stop dividing people along ridiculous lines.

To answer your question, it takes no feminists to screw in a light bulb
because they will lobby the government to make some man do it for them.

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dccoolgai
Babbage may have written programs for his Analytical Engine while he was
building it.. so that makes him the first computer engineer, but I think the
term "programmer" implies that someone specializes in writing "client"
instructions for machines - thus, it is still valid to say that Lovelace was
the first programmer.

~~~
jgrahamc
That seems like a nonsensical argument. Babbage's preserved notebooks which
Plan 28 is studying clearly show Babbage designing the machine and instruction
set (both of which changed over time) with specific programs in mind. There
are even programs on punched card that he prepared. He clearly was
programming.

Also, given that there was never an Analytical Engine built no one was a
programmer in the sense of being a third-party who merely prepares programs
for the machine rather than being involved in its design. The only way
Lovelace could have prepared programs was if she was intimate with the design
of the machine.

The design of machines and their programming going hand in hand was extremely
common in the early days of computing. Just read about the IAS machine that
von Neumann worked on, or Turing's design of the ACE. This was natural because
they would have programs in mind when designing the instruction set (see, for
example, the fact that the Pilot ACE had floating point because the designers
knew what they were going to use it for).

