Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace

Might be harder to get the impact assessment to choose from: crash, error, incorrect function, botheration.

But I'll give it a go.

For example, Wolfram writes

> In apparent resonance with some of my own work 150 years later, he talks about the relationship between mechanical processes, natural laws and free will.

in which the phrase 'my own work' is an embedded link to the table of contents of NKS. He also writes

> The one big exception to this was his almost-50-year persistence in trying to automate the process of computation. I myself have shared a modern version of this very goal in my own life (…, Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram Language, …)—though so far only for 40 years. I am fortunate to have lived in a time when ambient technology made this much easier to achieve, but in every large project I have done it has still taken a certain singlemindedness and gritty tenacity—as well as leadership—to actually get it finished.

in which the terms 'Mathematica', 'Wolfram|Alpha', and 'Wolfram Language' are links to those respective proprietary projects of Wolfram's -- thus clearly deviating from the notion of a neutral historical account and drifting into self-aggrandizing advertisement for a set of modern commercial products that are truly unrelated to the content of the essay (Lovelace's contributions).

Wolfram continues with this kind of stuff, at one point saying:

> There was still, though, a suspicion that perhaps some other way of making computers might lead to a different form of computation. And it actually wasn’t until the 1980s that universal computation became widely accepted as a robust notion. And by that time, something new was emerging—notably through work I was doing: that universal computation was not only something that’s possible, but that it’s actually common.

>And what we now know (embodied for example in my Principle of Computational Equivalence) is that beyond a low threshold a very wide range of systems—even of very simple construction—are actually capable of universal computation.

in which the phrase 'Principle of Computational Equivalence' is an embedded link to chapter 12 of NKS. Once again, what on earth is this doing in a historical essay? It's not relevant to the story of Babbage and Lovelace. What he says about universal computation is highly debateable (it was certainly recognized within professional computer science long before the 80s, and indeed as many criticisms of NKS point out, even Wolfram's own supposedly important result was mostly a proof developed by another person and was largely a minor extension of widely published work already known to the community at the time).

These are not "small asides personal notes" as you write it. These are structural elements of the whole essay. Even when he is talking about a topic you'd think could not be perverted by self-aggrandizing marketing, we still manages to shoehorn in something irrelevant about Mathematica:

> Today, of course, it’s instantaneous to do the computation in the Wolfram Language:

What? The instantaneousness of it is not related to the historical article at all -- it's just a way to shoehorn in Mathematica. And then just below that:

> And, as it happens, a few years ago, just to show off new algorithms, we even computed 10 million of them.

where the part 'computed 10 million of them' is an embedded link to a press release article from the Mathematica blog.

You seem to have glossed over the article and chosen two extremely innocuous examples (the bit about his former school and the bit about logarithm tables). Those two asides are not representative of the sweepingly self-aggrandizing and self-promotional items that are all over the article.

These parts by Wolfram do a disservice to Lovelace and Babbage in as much as they greatly weaken the accuracy and relevance of the overall piece, and add noise that the reader must be careful to navigate around if she wants to enjoy the historical bits.

At any rate, I don't think I am expressing an "eye to be irritated" as you put it. It's all just plain to see in Wolfram's writing.

No, this is quite different. Wolfram clearly and unequivocally depicts his accomplishments as being significant to the same degree as Babbage and Lovelace, if not even more significant. The significance of Wolfram's accomplishments is not relevant to an article about Babbage and Lovelace. Even just a neutral statement of Wolfram's accomplishments is not very relevant (especially because of all of the controversy around the actual proof of the main result that Wolfram tries to take credit for, but that's just an aside).

> That is actually pretty normal for anyone running a blog on their corporate site. It doesn't compromise a neutral account just wiki-ing up the article.

Yes, it does compromise neutral accounts. That's why we don't consider anecdotes published on marketing blogs to be reliable neutral accounts. Even so, I agree that Wolfram did a lot of work here, and that large sections of this essay are of far higher quality than a typical marketing blog. Which makes it all the more tragic that he ruined the overall piece by needing to shoehorn in unrelated comments about his own career and proprietary projects.

> No, it just shows how much the world of computation has improved and how amazing the accomplishments of both Ada and Babbage. I would have said FORTRAN, but that's more my thing as some probably would have said R.

No. There are any number of ways to higlight how the landscape of computing has changed (although, higlighting that in an essay about Lovelace's contributions in her time is already on thin ice as far as relevancy goes) -- almost all of which don't involve plugging the specific proprietary project that the author worked on. It's disingenuous of you to nonchalantly act like it could have been FORTRAN or R or whatever, as if Mathematica is "just another" option and "just so happened" to be the one that Wolfram chose to highlight. Yeah, right.

> No, I gave a count and actually assembled a list.

This could still be consistent with choosing two innocuous quotes to draw attention away from the many flagrant quotes in the article. There's no way to know based solely on your supply of just those two particular quotes in your original reply.

> Hey, if I had went to the same school as Babbage, I sure would of pointed it out. Heck, I would have shown pictures.

Again, the school comment is not the sort of comment I am criticizing. There's no need for you to defend it again after I already agreed it was innocuous. If all of Wolfram's self-promotional asides were like that, it would be a little tiresome but no big deal. They are not like that.

> No, it just gives the experience of one man seeing historical figures and relating them in terms he uses daily. Your reading is uncharitable.

No, it's once again extremely disingenuous to act like repeated self-promotional asides are merely "terms he uses daily." Unfortunately, that may actually be true about Wolfram, but it doesn't change the fact that it's the terms' self-promotional-ness that is the problem, and whether they are common idioms for Wolfram (e.g. whether he self-promotes a lot and that is just how he internalizes the things he learns about) is irrelevant to other readers.

So, we disagree and that's OK. You're certainly welcome to find my interpretation uncharitable. I continue to believe that it is Wolfram himself being uncharitable, and supplying a wealth of evidence to support this with his own writing.

It really does take what would otherwise be a nice essay and ruin it. Some of it can be overlooked, but I find that in particular the mentions of the Principle of Computational Equivalence and the references to his own supposedly long-suffering career battles that have required "grit" and "leadership" specifically on Wolfram's part are way over the top and just not at all defensible along the lines of what you are saying.