Ada Lovelace was not the first computer programmer | Hacker News Reader

Ada Lovelace was not the first computer programmer

true-equality.net

18 pointsstesch32 comments

If I do say so myself, a much better analysis of Ada Lovelace's contribution is my own blog post "Lovelace's Leap": http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/lovelaces-leap.html

For those, that don't know I run a charity called Plan 28 that is working on building Babbage's unrealized Analytical Engine: http://plan28.org/

The OP confuses the Analytical Engine and Difference Engine and from that I would guess his grasp of the subject matter isn't deep. To his point that Babbage wrote programs for the Difference Engine (sic) (I'm sure the OP means the AE), there are programs in The Science Museum in London on punched cards waiting to be executed: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/program-waits.html They were prepared by Babbage.

Came here to say exactly that, thanks for making the case more elaborate than i would have made it :)

"He is a libertarian, atheist, anti-feminist..." I stopped reading when I saw his self-description

I don't think that means he's against the dictionary definition of feminism. Much more likely he's against the contemporary feminist movement, which is a pretty common sentiment. Here's a good explanation: http://www.feminisnt.com/2009/biography-of-a-pornographic-po... There's a lot on that page but start here:

Why would you NOT want call yourself a feminist? Barring being a feminist, the only option left is that you must be a misogynist.

I don't call myself a suffragette, either, but that doesn't mean I am against women being allowed to vote. I consider myself very much anti-sexist and pro-equality, because sexism is still a problem in my society. However, oppressive attitudes based on gender and sexuality are frequently perpetuated by people who call themselves feminists, and anti-male sexism (perpetuated by feminists in particular) is on the rise.

Is someone's self-labeling as anti-[insert any politically correct opinion] a good reason to dismiss one's argument?

Not necessarily, but it's a decent heuristic for spotting a confused point of view and argumentative tendencies, which suit an irrational voice so well. Also, it's a fine reason not to bother reading something. ... I hadn't noticed the self-description; but the sophomorically sloppy, self-important, ungramatical writing style made it dismissable enough for me.

No, but it does explain why his argument is as strident and stilted as it is.

No, but he sounds like a complete dickwad. What sort of sane person is against the notion that women should be equal? I doubt his understanding of feminism is much deeper than some garbage he read on an MRA site once, and thus it follows that he's likely to be wrong about a lot of other things due to having an axe to grind whilst simultaneously being an ignoramus.

I mean look at the description of his YouTube channel:

"What is equality? We in the men's rights movement believe in equality of opportunity, that as long as the playing field is level then the outcomes should not matter. The feminists tend to believe that equality of outcome is what matters, that the columns under men and women must match for there to be no more sexism. So what really matters at the end of the day is what you are comparing. Rights or outcomes? This is the foundation of our debate."

So essentially his entire worldview is based on a complete strawman. Skills.

> What sort of sane person is against the notion that women should be equal?

What the hell does it even mean? Today "equal" is just a semantic stopsign [0]. His YouTube channel description at least attempts to explain how he understands the term 'equality'. You can agree or disagree with "equality of outcomes" vs. "equality of opportunity", but "men/women should be equal" is just plain meaningless.

> No, but he sounds like a complete dickwad.

Also, it's still an ad hominem. We should evaluate his arguments on their merits, not on his beliefs. Which we can do after we actually read them.

[0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Semantic_stopsign

Well exactly, within feminism the issue of what equality is is a hotly debated thing, and even moreso is the way to achieve it. But I guess if he just wants to disregard that and keep hacking at the strawman it's his problem.

It's really irritating how feminists insist that anyone who disagrees with their very narrow and totally contradictory views of what it means for "women to be equal" is against equality for women.

It is really irritating how people insist on using the term "feminist" to refer to a narrow, incoherent media trope.

Someone clearly let the straw feminists out of the closet again. HSSSSS!

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=341

Well that's a complete strawman if ever I saw one...

Go away, troll. This does not contribute anything to the discussion at hand and only shows that you don't want to process information that may contradict your own idea of fairness.

Yeaaaaah. MRAs aren't exactly known for their even-handed and rational evaluation of anything involving women or women's issues.

I'm not sure that's fair. I think both the majority of MRAs and feminists are egalitarians. It's the vocal crazies that cause us to characterize entire groups. I've seen it from both sides.

In any case, as yummyfajitas points out it's an ad-hominem argument. We should discuss the argument itself rather than the merits of the man making them.

MRAs that describe themselves as "anti-feminist" tend to be a certain kind of bitter - the vocal crazies that you talk about.

The better MRAs are more even-handed and rational than any feminists I've come across, and screw women over less too in some important regards. For instance, they actually consider female-perpetrated rape and abuse against other women to be just as wrong as any other form of rape or abuse, which is something feminists fairly consistently fail at.

I've even seen a major feminist blogger take her own experiences of abuse, conclude from them that all such abuse is caused by the abuser being male, then tell another woman who'd been abused in the same way by her mother that it was "irrational" for her to be upset by this and that she was "erasing" the blogger's own "lived experiences" by complaining about said blogger's conclusions, and bemoan how she'd been lead astray by the evil MRA community into thinking that her experiences actually mattered.

I'm confused - is he correct or incorrect? Please justify your answer without using the ad-hominem fallacy.

Why stay confused? Just go read jgrahamc's reply above. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648430

The first, one of the first, why does it really matter? He's clearly using this as a platform to attack things that feminists say in order to feel good about himself.

He wants to out modern feminism as a movement based on emotion and propaganda, not fact.

By firmly planting his argument in emotion and polemical sloganeering ... and thereby showing the unworkability of this approach to discussion? (Pretty sophisticated!)

Google "feminist math". I thought his argument was emotional but also referenced enough original sources to be credible.

It is kind of stupid to think Babbage wouldn't have written programs for his own machine.

That being said, Grace Hopper is one of my heroes. It's like having a black friend so you can feel free to criticize Obama! Haha.

I googled it. Did you mean the first link? It looks well written and interesting from the first couple paragraphs.. The whole list? Yeah, I'm familiar with the topic.

I think the article's author's central premise (to paraphrase: that Ada Lovelace is a phony promoted by other rank phonies for [unexplained, mostly inscrutable but surely, somehow base] political and/or emotional warm-fuzzies) is 110%, really pretty low-grade, claptrap.

Consider the question of Lovelace's role in CS ...

From the perspective of the author of the Ada language[1], call him Jean: he probably must have had some kind of psychic crush on her, right? Any of us (males, I mean) might assume.

From the perspective of later 20th century CS historians, who presumably bestowed the title "first programmer": Babbage was a hardware engineer; of course he designed the assembly language, in tandem with designing the machine; but since the dawn of computing, and still today, there exists a decided, if fuzzy line, between hardware and software "engineers'. And Lovelace owns the innovation of considering numbers as representations of any possible discrete item beyond mere numbers (hm, maybe Leibnitz did this earlier, but that really doesn't count, does it?[2]), which is /key/. So, call them, respectively, first hardware architect, first software programmer. Fair enough?

I think we can definitively settle the question with a time machine - I presume that Charles and Ada would be quite pleased to discuss all such trivia over tea with an esteemed time-traveller. -- Now you have a new, better project that trolling HN threads (jk ;-P).

And no, he referenced nowhere near enough original sources to seem even vaguely credible on such a complex, controversial topic. (See also the first reply in this thread, from jgrahamc - who does give the sense of having actually researched the labyrinthian topic.) And yes, Admiral Hopper. What is with white girls? And how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

No offense.

[1] "Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the DoD." [wikipedia:Ada (programming language)] [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Symbo...

No offense taken. I'm just tired of rah rah feminism. It's so boring. Just stop dividing people along ridiculous lines.

To answer your question, it takes no feminists to screw in a light bulb because they will lobby the government to make some man do it for them.

Except that "out" doesn't really apply. You could definitely critique certain aspects of it (as I regularly do), but he's allowing his own emotion and hatred to get in the way of having reasonable discourse.

Anyone who's looked at feminism even briefly knows that there are lots of issues within the feminist movement, and lots of different ideologies and groups with different goals, and to treat them all as one completely undermines anything relevant one has to say.

Babbage may have written programs for his Analytical Engine while he was building it.. so that makes him the first computer engineer, but I think the term "programmer" implies that someone specializes in writing "client" instructions for machines - thus, it is still valid to say that Lovelace was the first programmer.

That seems like a nonsensical argument. Babbage's preserved notebooks which Plan 28 is studying clearly show Babbage designing the machine and instruction set (both of which changed over time) with specific programs in mind. There are even programs on punched card that he prepared. He clearly was programming.

Also, given that there was never an Analytical Engine built no one was a programmer in the sense of being a third-party who merely prepares programs for the machine rather than being involved in its design. The only way Lovelace could have prepared programs was if she was intimate with the design of the machine.

The design of machines and their programming going hand in hand was extremely common in the early days of computing. Just read about the IAS machine that von Neumann worked on, or Turing's design of the ACE. This was natural because they would have programs in mind when designing the instruction set (see, for example, the fact that the Pilot ACE had floating point because the designers knew what they were going to use it for).

Like with most things scientific, when one gets down to the fine details, it's hard to make any solid conclusion of who was "first."

It's most likely that Lovelace and Babbage had already had conversations about computing before the machine was fully concieved, and so while their individual insights may have been different, they ultimately come from a collaborative perspective.

I think that would be bending the meaning of 'programmer' to support a particular argument. He wrote programs for the machine, he is a programmer, as simple as that.

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