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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)

#91

Post by [deleted] »

suzzer99 wrote: post #64
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.

We had a developer write his own System.out.println in Java. But it wasn't because he didn't like the built-in System.out.println, it was because he didn't know it existed. He had a PhD and was supposedly a senior developer. He didn't last very long.

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by Jensson »

kergonath wrote: post #85
HideousKojima wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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

There really aren't more of those than there are people trying to give more credit to those women than there is evidence for. In the end there are foul play from both sides, but currently one side is dominating academia so there is much more need to argue against that side than the other.

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

#93

Post by lazide »

kirkules wrote: post #34
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.

I'm reminded of a high school programming class where a project partner named variables with the most crude and lewd words he could imagine. Not that I was prudish, but he unsurprisingly never remembered what "butts" was for and somehow never figured out why he kept getting confused by his own code.

Butts ARE distracting sometimes.

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

#94

Post by lazide »

lukan wrote: post #31
glouwbug wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The question to me always was, does it makes sense in the way of, it is intuitivly understandable, or does it only make sense, if it was drilled into you long enough? (I suspect the latter)

Harder maths are often so inscrutable that single letter variables are also the least of your problems.

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

#95

Post by interactivecode »

Izkata wrote: post #75
m463 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He wrote his own font, once, because he didn't like the way... Wonder how many folks here have done the same thing, building and discarding in the throes of creation like tibetan monks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala

I've used fontforge out of curiosity before, but never kept what I made. I am still using a custom mouse cursor I made almost 20 years ago.

Please share! Super curious what the cursor looks like

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

#96

Post by lazide »

retrac wrote: post #45
StableAlkyne wrote: post #3

> The Difference Engine was not a computer, because all it did was add and subtract. The definition of computer is pretty grey for the pre-digital era, and it wasn't turing complete, but is it actually controversial whether it was a computer?

Is an early 20th century mechanical desk calculator a computer? There is no consensus on definition but for me, a computer follows a program. Maybe even only one fixed program. But a program. If there is no stepping through a program it is not a computer. Does the iterative method used by the difference engine constitute a program?

The term ‘computer’ originates from humans trained (and paid!) to explicitly do lots of math, so it seems to be.

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

#97

Post by zanderwohl »

suzzer99 wrote: post #64
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.

We had a developer write his own System.out.println in Java. But it wasn't because he didn't like the built-in System.out.println, it was because he didn't know it existed. He had a PhD and was supposedly a senior developer. He didn't last very long.

He must have had a very interesting educational path to write functional Java code without knowing about println. I marvel at that. I almost admire it. Because I think pretty much every tutorial in the world for every language starts with printing, and every project has it someplace. He must have learned via some esoteric means.

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

#98

Post by jonahx »

coldtea wrote: post #88
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"?

I wasn't saying it's bad or untrue necessarily.

Just funny how the same thing is said while the goalposts keep moving, buttressed by this vague, unspecified notion of "the real creative work" or "the things only humans are good it".

And with current LLMs, and the spectre of even greater automated intelligence, our sphere of unique ability shrinks.

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

#99

Post by wizzwizz4 »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #82
jandrese wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And he may well have done, if Ada Lovelace hadn't got cancer: she had managed to convince him to let her run his business, leaving him to deal only with R&D.

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

#100

Post by lukan »

lazide wrote: post #94
lukan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question to me always was, does it makes sense in the way of, it is intuitivly understandable, or does it only make sense, if it was drilled into you long enough? (I suspect the latter)

Harder maths are often so inscrutable that single letter variables are also the least of your problems.

Certainly. But on top of the hard problem, I don't like to be distracted by unreadable code ..
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