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charlesoberonn-deactivated20150

If you disrespect women in the tech industry, the angry spirits of Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, and Grace Hopper, the creator of the first compiler, will delete all the commenting from someone’s code just before you have to debug it.

thetransintransgenic

I’m not sure that this post gets across exactly what this means to non-programming people.

Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, yes, but you have to understand that when she was programming a computer, it was the hypothetical computer that Charles Babbage had half-finished-designed. She wasn’t just the first computer programmer, she was the first computer programmer, before computers existed. And, also, she was the one who saw it as something more than a number-crunching machine — she was the first — and until the fifties, the only — person who saw the potential not just for numbers but for music and text and art in computers.

Grace Hopper, meanwhile, didn’t just create the first compiler — she was at the forefront of the idea of compilers and programming languages. See, before that, people wrote programs for the machine, in the specific language that the machine spoke. So, a program written for a UNIVAC 1 would be completely different than a program written for a Mark 1 Star — if you had a program that could run on one of them, and wanted to run it on the other, you’d have to completely rewrite the program. The idea of programming languages let you write a program for one computer, and then use it — without needing to change it — on any other computer that had a compiler for that programming language. If you don’t understand why that’s powerful, then remember that you’re reading this on a web browser which you can run on Macs, Windows, Linux, on a website running code (HTML+CSS+Javascript) which can run on not only many different computers but also on many different web browsers on each of those computers, and that the fact that all these different computers can display webpages the same is what lets this huge interconnected web of the internet function. The idea of a compiler is one of the single biggest things which make computers these weird new things. (And, also there’s this: “‘Nobody believed that,’ she said. ‘I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.’” — how, like, she was one of the first people in the 1950s to rediscover the idea of computers doing more than just arithmetic.)

And finally, what removing the comments from code does. Ideally, you can see what code does just by looking at it. For example:

print("Hello world")

pretty obviously prints “Hello world”. But by the time you get to something like:

with YoutubeDL(ydl_opts) as ydl: ydl.print_debug_header() ydl.add_default_info_extractors() # PostProcessors # Add the metadata pp first, the other pps will copy it if opts.addmetadata: ydl.add_post_processor(FFmpegMetadataPP()) if opts.extractaudio: ydl.add_post_processor(FFmpegExtractAudioPP(preferredcodec=opts.audioformat, preferredquality=opts.audioquality, nopostoverwrites=opts.nopostoverwrites)) if opts.recodevideo: ydl.add_post_processor(FFmpegVideoConvertor(preferedformat=opts.recodevideo)) if opts.embedsubtitles: ydl.add_post_processor(FFmpegEmbedSubtitlePP(subtitlesformat=opts.subtitlesformat)) if opts.xattrs: ydl.add_post_processor(XAttrMetadataPP()) if opts.embedthumbnail: if not opts.addmetadata: ydl.add_post_processor(FFmpegAudioFixPP()) ydl.add_post_processor(AtomicParsleyPP()) # Update version if opts.update_self: update_self(ydl.to_screen, opts.verbose) # Remove cache dir if opts.rm_cachedir: if opts.cachedir is None: ydl.to_screen(u'No cache dir specified (Did you combine --no-cache-dir and --rm-cache-dir?)') else: if ('.cache' not in opts.cachedir) or ('youtube-dl' not in opts.cachedir): ydl.to_screen(u'Not removing directory %s - this does not look like a cache dir') retcode = 141 else: ydl.to_screen( u'Removing cache dir %s .' % opts.cachedir, skip_eol=True) if os.path.exists(opts.cachedir): ydl.to_screen(u'.', skip_eol=True) shutil.rmtree(opts.cachedir) ydl.to_screen(u'.') # Maybe do nothing if (len(all_urls) < 1) and (opts.load_info_filename is None): if not (opts.update_self or opts.rm_cachedir): parser.error(u'you must provide at least one URL') else: sys.exit() try: if opts.load_info_filename is not None: retcode = ydl.download_with_info_file(opts.load_info_filename) else: retcode = ydl.download(all_urls) except MaxDownloadsReached: ydl.to_screen(u'--max-download limit reached, aborting.') retcode = 101 sys.exit(retcode)

It’s hard enough to understand what’s happening even with the comments. (and this is just a very small excerpt from a larger program. Full source here.) Start removing the comments, and the first thing you’ll have to do when you get the code is find out what the heck everything does. And remember, if you have to debug something, it has bugs in it. Which means that something is doing something wrong.

raginrayguns

I think this post communicates something very important about the history of ideas.

It’s tempting to imagine the writer of the first compiler as a time traveler from the modern age, who found herself in a world without compilers and thus had to write one.

But so much more was different–people thought of computers differently.

It’s hard to imagine the conceptual obstacles to invention.

oktavia-von-gwwcendorff-deactiv

Ada Lovelace: the world’s first this is your brain on plastics dreaming up amazing vaporware about what computers {c|sh}ould do

Grace Hopper: the world’s first plasticbrains dreamer who actually shipped the vaporware

Delay between the two: over a hundred years

yep, sounds about right

the-grey-tribe

I read a long article by a historian/computer scientist about the extent of Ada Lovelace’s contributions. He lamented that because Ada is a figurehead of women in tech nowadays, you cannot really say too loudly that she did not write the first program, and her postulation of symbolic expressions was vague and unspecific. Maybe she did not predict Theano from the 19th century. compare history https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ada with hagiography http://www.cs4fn.org/magazine/cs4fnissue20.pdf In the light of Ada Lovelace’s symbolic value, paranoid discoursers might assign additional significance to the possible appointment of David Gelernter. The Linda language follows the pattern of naming “improved” versions of programs as puns on basic versions: elm->pine, more->less, man->bro, multics->unix, cat->dog, roff->ronn. The Ada->Linda pun is something else though.

best-blurst-of-times

She wrote out a program to compute Bernoulli numbers in the notes that she added to her own translation (from Italian into English, implying a deep knowledge of the topics discussed) of a paper about Babbage’s machine. I actually suspect that the retconning happened recently and in the other direction (before the internet, but after the gender ratio bias in tech became obvious). She was very clearly a genius, and so was her Dad (tends to run in families). It’s not at all a stretch to call her the first computer programmer.

Wolfram never quite admits this, but it’s pretty clear from his 2015 investigation:

What’s become the most famous part of what Ada wrote is the computation of Bernoulli numbers, in Note G. This seems to have come out of a letter she wrote to Babbage, in July 1843. She begins the letter with “I am working very hard for you; like the Devil in fact; (which perhaps I am)”. Then she asks for some specific references, and finally ends with, “I want to put in something about Bernoulli’s Numbers, in one of my Notes, as an example of how an implicit function may be worked out by the engine, without having been worked out by human head & hands first…. Give me the necessary data & formulae.”

[…]

But there’s nothing as sophisticated—or as clean—as Ada’s computation of the Bernoulli numbers. Babbage certainly helped and commented on Ada’s work, but she was definitely the driver of it.

So what did Babbage say about that? In his autobiography written 26 years later, he had a hard time saying anything nice about anyone or anything. About Ada’s Notes, he writes: “We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several, but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.”

When I first read this, I thought Babbage was saying that he basically ghostwrote all of Ada’s Notes. But reading what he wrote again, I realize it actually says almost nothing, other than that he suggested things that Ada may or may not have used.

To me, there’s little doubt about what happened: Ada had an idea of what the Analytical Engine should be capable of, and was asking Babbage questions about how it could be achieved. If my own experiences with hardware designers in modern times are anything to go by, the answers will often have been very detailed. Ada’s achievement was to distill from these details a clear exposition of the abstract operation of the machine—something which Babbage never did. (In his autobiography, he basically just refers to Ada’s Notes.)

[…]

I think one can fairly say that Ada Lovelace was the first person ever to glimpse with any clarity what has become a defining phenomenon of our technology and even our civilization: the notion of universal computation.