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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

For historical reference:

> The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field. Grace Hopper was the first person to design a compiler for a programming language. [0] Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was predominantly done by women; significant examples include the Harvard Computers, codebreaking at Bletchley Park and engineering at NASA. After the 1960s, the computing work that had been dominated by women evolved into modern software, and the importance of women decreased. [1]

What a crazy history, and wiki entry. My supposition is that as soon as it started to become even slightly obvious that software was going to eat the world, the dominant social paradigm prevailed.

[0] WTF, how is she not way more celebrated? She invented the effing compiler!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

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> The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field.

Babbage designed the first programs for the analytical engine.

> Grace Hopper was the first person to design a compiler for a programming language.

Hopper was the first person to use the word "compiler" for a program, but it was not a compiler by the modern meaning; it was a linker, and not the first.

> Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was predominantly done by women;

Not by the modern meaning; they manually entered programs designed by men.

> After the 1960s, the computing work that had been dominated by women evolved into modern software, and the importance of women decreased.

The design of programs has always been done by men mostly.

I am just trying to understand the history. Let me start with one point.

>> The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field.

> Babbage designed the first programs for the Analytical engine.

I am trying to understand the wiki entry in my gp vs. this post [0]

Is the wiki entry entirely wrong?

[0] https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/2018/07/26/ada-l...

> Is the wiki entry entirely wrong?

Yes. The reference it cites contradicts it: "The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace" with a link to https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Ada_and_the_First_Comput... which says "Many people, for instance, incorrectly claim that Ada was the first computer programmer. (Babbage, not Ada, wrote the first programs for his Analytical Engine, although most were never published.)"

This is also a bit of a silly word play. Ada Lovelace got credit in some early works as being the first programmer as distinct from the designer of a machine that does calculations. This isn't a completely meaningless distinction. Especially considering that many modern programmers have no ideas on the physical work that the computer is doing.

But, it stands to reason that Babbage had some problems he sent through his machine. I would wager anyone that had access to it tried their hand some.

>Is the wiki entry entirely wrong?

It is a Wikipedia article on a topic with clear "culture war" significance. The topic is not an objective individual person, event, place etc., but a narrative about events unfolding over a considerable time span, which concerns itself with a subset of the population and their interaction with technology and thus society.

Yes, of course it's entirely wrong. Wikipedia cannot be trusted for this sort of thing. It is a tertiary source by design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_terti...), which entails that the most obsessed editors can cherry-pick what they like from already biased secondary sources (the ones considered "reliable"; the reputations of which may not be tarnished by "original research" or by conclusive proof coming from outside the list).

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