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What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

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Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#81

Post by kazinator »

lmm wrote: post #79
kazinator wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 4cc gets a decent distribution in that you don't have to examine very many collisions to find the character you're looking for (or conclude it's not found). A poor distribution is an obvious bug in hashing; if you don't suffer from that bug, you don't have to do anything. If you have the bug, it's obvious you have to change your hash calculation to avoid it. The developers of 4cc may have struggled with bugs wher…

> A poor distribution is an obvious bug in hashing; if you don't suffer from that bug, you don't have to do anything. Right, but if you don't have and solve that problem then what you have made isn't a hash table. Often you don't need a hash table - if you have something that already has a nice distribution, you can use a simpler data structure (like, IDK, a radix tree) and get all the properties you wanted. > The in…

Note that a radix tree and hash table are not mutually exclusive. A radix tree is a way of representing a sparse table. That could be used as a hash table. There's a trade off there because if the table is very sparse, and we're using hashing, we could just shrink the table so as not to have it so sparse, and then just make it a regular array.

The key aspect of the four corner code is that it mashes together completely unrelated characters. There's no meaningful index to it. It's not easy to look at a four corner code to figure out the list of characters it aliases for.

Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#82

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

jandrese wrote: post #43
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an employee like that. He'd want to do something, and hit a roadblock, so he'd design his own tool (He wrote his own font, once, because he didn't like the way the built-in ones worked at teeny point sizes). Best damn engineer I ever knew, but I had to keep an eye out for rabbitholing.

Babbage would have likely had more success if he stayed in England and opened his own precision machine shop.

My thinking exactly. He could've created a market for adding machines and, building on commercial success, use revenues to build more ambitious machines.

Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#83

Post by nextaccountic »

glouwbug wrote: post #27
seanhunter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...or worked with any mathematicians/physicists/engineers who program. As soon as I saw that, I thought "typical quant". Like my dad (A chemical engineer) learned to program in FORTRAN, which used to insist variable names were 1 letter and up to 2 digits. He later learned Basic, but his code was still spiritually FORTRAN so the one-letter-two digits thing stuck. I thought that was just him but then much later I went…

That naming convention makes perfect sense to the mathematician, so why not? It's why we use `for(int i = i; i < n; i++)` in for loops; its the mathematical sigma sum of values with the same naming convention

Which is why Haskell likes single letter variables too

Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#84

Post by adalacelove »

seanhunter wrote: post #15
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #9

> In fact, aside from the profusion of variables with unhelpful names, the C translation of Lovelace’s program doesn’t look that alien at all. Clearly the author never met my coworkers.

...or worked with any mathematicians/physicists/engineers who program. As soon as I saw that, I thought "typical quant". Like my dad (A chemical engineer) learned to program in FORTRAN, which used to insist variable names were 1 letter and up to 2 digits. He later learned Basic, but his code was still spiritually FORTRAN so the one-letter-two digits thing stuck. I thought that was just him but then much later I went…

I guess because mathematical formulas usually use single letters for symbols. It is so common that you end using several different alphabets, lower/upper case and even calligraphic variations. Of course it doesn't scale when you need thousands of symbols and your variables doesn't have well established meanings like "magnetic field" or "pressure". However they are used to it and it's hard to break some mental models after several years of using them everyday. For good or bad some scientific computer languages (like Julia) encourage you to use the Unicode alphabet to align your code with your paper/book.

Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#85

Post by kergonath »

HideousKojima wrote: post #76
Manuel_D wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_... > 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…

It's always been strange to me, given that Lovelace's program was a note in some documents that she was preparing under Babbage's directions as a scribe of sorts, that so many people assume it was her work and not Babbage's. Based on other details of her life she was clearly a very intelligent and talented woman, but the obsession with attributing the first ever computer program to her seems entirely ideologically mo…

> Lovelace's program was a note in some documents that she was preparing under Babbage's directions as a scribe of sorts

It was not the case. She was translating someone else’s article, and it does not seem she did it under direction or supervision.

> so many people assume it was her work and not Babbage's.

What she did was quite common. She had ideas about the thing she was translating and thus added them as notes. All fairly straightforward.

> the obsession with attributing the first ever computer program to her seems entirely ideologically motivated.

To me the obsession that some people (not you, but some definitely do and use the same arguments) have with bringing her down is entirely ideologically motivated. She was recognised for a long time, and while there are discussions about exactly who was first and such (as there always are when discussing History), her role was mostly uncontroversial. Also bear in mind that calculator and then programmer were women’s jobs until some point in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Having a woman write code was not controversial before the establishment of the bro culture.

Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#87

Post by jonahx »

This insight was all the more remarkable given that Menabrea saw the Analytical Engine primarily as a tool for automating “long and arid computation,” which would free up the intellectual capacities of brilliant scientists for more advanced thinking.

It's funny how enduring this trope about automation is. The same thing is said now of LLMs.

Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#88

Post by coldtea »

jonahx wrote: post #87

This insight was all the more remarkable given that Menabrea saw the Analytical Engine primarily as a tool for automating “long and arid computation,” which would free up the intellectual capacities of brilliant scientists for more advanced thinking. It's funny how enduring this trope about automation is. The same thing is said now of LLMs.

Well, isn't the main point of computers as tools (as opposed to consumption devices) the automating of “long and arid computation"?

Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#89

Post by coldtea »

TomatoCo wrote: post #51
neuronet wrote: post #11

A really cool article. From the Intro: > She thought carefully about how operations could be organized into groups that could be repeated, thereby inventing the loop. She realized how important it was to track the state of variables as they changed, introducing a notation to illustrate those changes. As a programmer myself, I’m startled to see how much of what Lovelace was doing resembles the experience of writing so…

> She realized how important it was to track the state of variables as they changed, introducing a notation to illustrate those changes. The thing that really stuck out to me was how similar it was to static single assignment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_single-assignment_form#... I think this is a state-of-the-art technique today and she had it, what, 180 years ago?

Well, if you do it manually, it was never not an option!

Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)

#90

Post by pacaro »

poizan42 wrote: post #80

A bit of an aside I have been wondering about is what people called her in her own time. Her name was Augusta Ada King, and she was the Countess of Lovelace. Was it common back then to shorten the title into a last name, or is it only something we have been doing in more recent time?

For the title holder, in this case the Earl of Lovelace, they are often referred to ("styled") simply by the place name. So after William King-Noel was created Earl.of Lovelace he was styled "Lovelace". She would have been styled "Lady Lovelace" in society, and "Countess of Lovelace" in formal contexts
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