[dead]
What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
121–130 of 138 posts
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#122Earlier 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…
I helped port a physicist's assembly code long ago; variables were named alphabetically in the order encountered in the code, e.g. A, B, ...A1, ..., AA1, etc. up to ZZ23. Still amazed that the nearly-incomprehensible code (and the port) worked
When I was a kid I used to think that having variables A... without any gaps in the letters meant that I did a good job of thinking out the program in advance.
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#123Earlier 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.
A motivation for reimplementing System.out.println might be to have it reliably display Unicode characters in Windows terminals, using WriteConsoleW.
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The real mark of a non-trivial program is that it doesn't work on the first try. not true.
Not -necessarily- true. I don’t typically expect my c to compile on the first try at 100 plus lines. Some languages do seem to be either so forgiving that they”work” without complaint or so structured that they guide you away from errors but are less expressive feeling.
fine, but gp did not equivocate.
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I once worked with a dev that implemented his own forEach in JavaScript. And literally used an ECMAScript version 6 feature to do so! (native forEach in JS showed up in ECMAScript 5) Meanwhile, that project already had jQuery and Underscore... which also had their own versions of forEach! It was a bizarre choice.
A forEach that could handle async/await would be nice. But for ... in is almost as good.
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it was System.out.printf not System.out.println
To be fair that was quite a late addition to the language all things considered. It could be he learned Java before it existed, or had most of his experience in 1.4 (which survived quite long in some environments because 1.5 was such a huge overhaul). But still, a good dev will keep up to date with language features.
This was circa 2002 FWIW.
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
He worked for some failed startup before we got him. Our project manager who had worked with him there, brought him in and said he was a genius.
I think maybe Java wasn't his first language. But to me, not realizing that Java would have something like System.out.println was a bad sign.
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#128> 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?
Probably not, it's stated in the TFA, the controversy is because Lovelace was a woman and some people think propping her up is basically a DEI retcon in history, the rest of us don't care. But I don't think it's anything whatsoever to do with actual computers
The parent asks about the Difference Engine. Lovelace wrote about the (more powerful) Analytical Engine. Nobody is denying the Analytical engine was a computer.
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the worst (and some of the best) developers I've known, have had advanced degrees. This guy has a high school diploma, and regularly stunned the Ph.Ds in Japan.
Same here, and I have worked alongside engineers from both ends of that spectrum. The only thing the degree'd individuals seemed to bring to the table is that they typically did not know what they did not know, thus were much more subject to Dunning-Kreuger.
"only thing they brought the table"?
Only you'd know but that seems rather uncharitable.
Re: What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
A quick recording: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Izkata/RandomDren/refs/hea...
I got the idea from another cursor I'd seen back then, and the basic tail was based on it. I think I did the animated ones, the blue dot was my own addition, and the fox head is entirely my own creation.
It doesn't actually flicker in and out like that, it seems to be some quirk from recording it.