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Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) is celebrated as "the first programmer" for her remarkable 1843 paper which explained Charles Babbage's designs for a mechanical computer. New research reinforces the view that she was a gifted, perceptive and knowledgeable mathematician.
Christopher Hollings and Ursula Martin of Oxford Mathematics, and Adrian Rice, of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, are the first historians of mathematics to investigate the extensive archives of the Lovelace-Byron family, held in Oxford's Bodleian Library. In two recent papers in the Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics and in Historia Mathematica they study Lovelace's childhood education, where her passion for mathematics was complemented by an interest in machinery and wide scientific reading; and her remarkable two-year "correspondence course" on calculus with the eminent mathematician Augustus De Morgan, who introduced her to cutting edge research on the nature of algebra.
[...] The papers, and the correspondence with De Morgan, can be read in full on the website of the Clay Mathematics Institute, who supported the work, as did the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
[There apparently had been many claims that she lacked the background to have been able to produce the works attributed to her. These papers serve to show that she did, indeed, have the necessary background, curiosity, dedication, and gift for insights to have done so. -Ed.]
Source: University of Oxford Mathematical Institute
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday July 04 2017, @05:36PM (8 children)
Indeed she was brilliant. I've found the section of her Notes where she outlines GIGO to be helpful when explaining why there can be more wrong with a program than simply giving it the wrong inputs:
This easily explains why business logic is hard. If the suits have not performed critical analysis, and if they aren't acquainted with all of the ramifications of their decisions, how on Earth could implementing their policies with a computer possibly help? Of course it's a complete recipe for disaster. Yet, the suits insist in their insanity over all objections, and the programmer dutifully implements their wishes, skillfully resolving all contradictions no matter how absurd the implications are, throwing in as many layers of epicycles and other nonsense necessary to make it work.
However, it seems that feminism is incapable of reading the Notes; feminists are too preoccupied with using Lovelace as a cudgel. “The first programmer was a woman,” it was explained to me. “If [womyn-born-womyn] were in charge of programming, computers wouldn't have bugs.” (Surely I won't remember the exact words.) The central tenet of wielding Lovelace in feminism is that not only do womyn-born-womyn all have some innate talent for computer programming because Lovelace was a woman (classic sympathetic magic [wikipedia.org]), but because men are inferior beings, their programs are riddled with errors. “Not only are all assigned males conspiring against womyn-born-womyn by sexually harassing and mansplaining them out of the field,” says the feminist, “but being incomplete, inferior beings they lack the natural, inborn talent inherent to all womyn-born-womyn for programming computers.”
Therefore, feminism reasons, not only is it evil that womyn-born-womyn (and never, ever trans women—cisgendered women only) are kept out of programming jobs, but it's evil again because womyn-born-womyn are then forced to use awful software while working jobs that are just below them.
I think Lovelace is an important figure in the history of computer science, and her writings remain true to this day. A liberal reading of her Notes, keeping in mind that she was stuck in the 19th century reasoning about a computing architecture that was beyond the skill of the day to build, shows that she had an intuition about many other concepts that would have to wait years and decades to be expressed concretely.
Feminism could get it right, but that it does not shows that feminism is a philosophy founded on bigotry. Feminism cheapens the value of Lovelace's contributions by using her as a cudgel. A bigot ascribes traits to a person using magical thinking, privileging incidental and inconsequential traits over traits that directly influence a person's capabilities. Thus, feminism concludes that having a womb is the most important trait a person can have to be a capable programmer. Feminism understands Lovelace's accomplishments merely in terms of her reproductive system, and it cannot see beyond her reproductive system.
Feminism's pursuit of the Misogynerd Narrative cheapens the true nature of Lovelace's accomplishments, and so feminism is only able to understand her contributions to the extent that it allows their use as merely weapons of intimidation and as a giant cop-out for why a beginner, who happens to be cisfemale, writes a program that produces wrong answer. It's conspiratorial thinking and bigotry at its finest. It's a perfect excuse for just giving the fuck up in the face of the first challenge. “My program didn't produce the right answers!” exclaims the cisfemale beginner whose motivation was feminist in nature. “You're conspiring against me and that's why my program didn't work! I have the same body parts as Ada Lovelace!”
This is why the cisfemale programmers cannot precipitate out of the æther. How the fuck could they when the reproductive system is privileged over the body part between the ears?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)
You could program in the Ada language, which uses strong typing and exception handling and runtime bounds checking to avoid many errors, but it will not eliminate bugs. Ada compilers are so rarely used that you might be lucky enough to encounter a bug in the compiler which makes your program behave incorrectly. The language itself is a walled garden and if you stay within the garden and only move data around the memory of your own program you should be safe, but if you want to interact with the operating system in any meaningful way, you will inevitably resort to using C language bindings, and anything you do with a C binding has all the pitfalls of programming in C itself. It is said Ada does not have pointers, but this claim is a dodge, since "access types" are pointers by another name. Type checking is easily defeated by "unchecked access" and "unchecked conversion" which are often necessary when interacting with existing C libraries. Ada is a crutch which people use to pretend poorly written programs will not have bugs. Better to learn to program correct C++ instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:58AM
Story about Ada, nobody wants to talk about the programming language named after Ada.
Dudes! Bros! Let's discuss Rust!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:00PM (3 children)
This is exactly why my tiny company sticks to engineering/scientific programming. Much less political, but, as I've learned, not completely free from politics. Every now and again an engineering manager really wants to hear that F=Ma2 or something equally silly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:21PM (2 children)
Easily falsifiable by dimensional analysis.
[F] N = [M] kg ⋅ [a] m s-2
Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is itself a simplistic dimensional analysis to convert kilograms to joules.
[E] J = [m] kg ⋅ [c2] m2 s−2
Einstein must have been a special education dunce because any school child can do dimensional analysis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:48PM (1 child)
> ...any school child can do dimensional analysis.
Really? I was never taught this important technique in grade school (at least not in enough depth that it stuck) and I went to a "highly rated" suburban school system, from 1960-1972. Now I often find young engineers that haven't learned it either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @10:24PM
When I studied physics in school, dimensional analysis wasn't something you were taught. It was something you just did if you wanted to pass the exams. Those who didn't figure out the basic concept of making sure the units matched up in equations were those students who simply failed.
(Score: 2, Touché) by In hydraulis on Wednesday July 05 2017, @01:32AM
What a bunch of gibberish.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:00PM
For males, especially of college age, I've always heard that it was a single organ that "drew all the blood away from the brain, impairing rational thought."
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