What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#51

Post by NeedMoreTea » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #32

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Analytical Engine was Turing complete so loops and conditionals would have been possible, but Babbage didn't get near building it. The London Science Museum built a fully working Difference Engine, to Victorian tolerances so it could have actually worked. I heard of a project to build a modern working replica but I don't know if anything ever came of it.

That would be https://plan28.org/ which I'm involved in. Blog for updates: http://blog.plan28.org/

Thanks! Nice to see it's still progressing.

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#52

Post by ropans808 » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

haihaibye wrote: post #34

zaroth wrote: post #4

Holy shit. I got shivers the moment I realized Sinclair actually finds and fixes a bug from the very first program written in 1843. In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. 1843! I was recently at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris, and they have several original Pascalines on display. So many marvels packed into a very tight space,…

It was the first published program but not the first. To be the first, you have to believe Babbage designed a general purpose computer that could accept instructions and never wrote any instructions. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/ada-lovelace-original-and-vi... “I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publicatio…

This is already discussed quite a bit in the article:

"Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published.19 So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though there’s always room to quibble about what exactly constitutes a “program.” Even so, Lovelace’s program was miles ahead of anything else that had been published before. The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching)..."

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#53

Post by jl2718 » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

kristoff_it wrote: post #6

Great article. In some ways it reminds me of Jonathan Blow's presentation titled "Truth in Game Design" [1] The author is saying that Ada deserves the title of first programmer both because she did publish an elaborate algorithm and because she understood the potential of the Analytical Engine better than Babbage and Menabrea. Jonathan Blow's presentation is more about that second point and how computers (or rather,…

Modesty by the creator is not due to lack of foresight, it is due to the exact nature of their understanding.

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#54

Post by gmiller123456 » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

blattimwind wrote: post #41

jordigh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends what you mean by "program". Would you argue that the Euclidean algorithm from two millenia prior was a program? Ada Lovelace was the first to realise that the analytical engine would perform arbitrary tasks and wrote programs for those arbitrary task, beyond computational operations. Of course Babbage who designed the hardware had some idea of what programs it could run and presented examples, but h…

> It really depends what you mean by "program". A [computer] program is a sequence of instructions executable by a machine (the computer). > Would you argue that the Euclidean algorithm from two millenia prior was a program? It's in the name: EA is an algorithm.

Looks like you got downvoted into oblivion, but I believe you bring up an important point that needs to be discussed, and that's "intent".

The string "x=1" can both be a computer program, and something intended only for humans to read. The Euclidean Algorithm was written specifically for humans to understand, with no intent for them to ever be interpreted by a machine. The fact that someone at some point did implement it doesn't retroactively make it the first program. Lovelace's "Diagram" was also not something a machine could directly execute. But the key difference was the intention, she specifically intended that her instructions could be interpreted and executed by a machine.

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#55

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

danielvf wrote: post #36

haihaibye wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the first published program but not the first. To be the first, you have to believe Babbage designed a general purpose computer that could accept instructions and never wrote any instructions. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/ada-lovelace-original-and-vi... “I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publicatio…

A group working on building an Analytical Engine, discovered that Lovelace’s Bernoulli program almost certainly would not be able to run on the Analytical Engine in Babbage’s notebooks. The “instruction set” was missing some required features. http://blog.plan28.org/2016/10/how-we-got-to-where-we-are.ht...

Better yet, that version didn’t have conditionals the user could employ at all, so it isn’t even a proper computer but rather a calculator.

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#56

Post by acqq » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

danielvf wrote: post #36

haihaibye wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the first published program but not the first. To be the first, you have to believe Babbage designed a general purpose computer that could accept instructions and never wrote any instructions. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/ada-lovelace-original-and-vi... “I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publicatio…

A group working on building an Analytical Engine, discovered that Lovelace’s Bernoulli program almost certainly would not be able to run on the Analytical Engine in Babbage’s notebooks. The “instruction set” was missing some required features. http://blog.plan28.org/2016/10/how-we-got-to-where-we-are.ht...

From what I understand, she clearly understood the limitations of what Babbage achieved and wrote her program to demonstrate the value of extending the hardware in order to run more universal "programs," like the one she writes!

http://rclab.de/rclab/_media/analyticalengine/aal_noteg_glas...

Also note that apparently Babbage later did consider exactly the implementation of the said missing hardware functionality:

http://blog.plan28.org/2016/10/how-we-got-to-where-we-are.ht...

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#57

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 21, 2018, 9:11 AM UTC

scarecrowbob wrote: post #10

rossdavidh wrote: post #7

This is a great article, and I also found myself shuddering to think what would happen if the world ever saw the first program I ever wrote (whatever that was).

For me, that's no big deal: 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" Even the horrible crap I wrote as an novice is probably less embarrassing to me that the stuff I wrote as a journeyman who shoulda known better. Thankfully, the most embarrassing things are, like, spending 2 days configuring postfix and not realizing that I could just read the log files and it tells me specifically what isn't working. A valuable lesson, but embarrass…

[deleted]

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#58

Post by fit2rule » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:41 PM UTC

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #15

scarecrowbob wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, that's no big deal: 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" Even the horrible crap I wrote as an novice is probably less embarrassing to me that the stuff I wrote as a journeyman who shoulda known better. Thankfully, the most embarrassing things are, like, spending 2 days configuring postfix and not realizing that I could just read the log files and it tells me specifically what isn't working. A valuable lesson, but embarrass…

Hahaha, mine: mov ah, 2 mov dl, 7 int 21 int 20 Discovering that I could write my own programs with debug.com was earth shaking. Picked up some decade old book on it at Half Price Books (which went well with my decade old machine -- an 80s model IBM with integrated monochrome green screen) and never looked back.

The first assembly program I wrote and got paid a handsome sum for:

    jmp FFF0

The client was amazed that I'd figured out a way to automate the ctrl-alt-del monkeys that had been hired to reboot everyones machines, for some reason, every night ..