BET you didn’t know that an obscure English noblewoman was the “first computer programmer,” did you?

And do you know why there aren’t millions of female computer programmers today? It’s because girls lack “role models.” But then, boys must have lacked role models once too because at some point in scientific history there had to have been no role models at all. It’s a conundrum. But it’s a conundrum that doesn’t much disturb those who refuse to acknowledge that the vast majority of women do not want to be computer programmers no matter how many gorgeous and dubious role models are thrust in their faces.

— Comments —

Eric writes:

From the Wikipedia page on Ada:

“It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Babbage wrote the ‘Notes’ to Menabrea’s paper, but for reasons of his own encouraged the illusion in the minds of Ada and the public that they were authored by her. It is no exaggeration to say that she was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine… To me, [correspondence between Ada and Babbage] seems to make obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the ‘Notes’ than trouble.”

As a computer programmer, I can only say that creating a computer from scratch was a lot harder than writing the first ‘hello, world’ program to run on it. Babbage’s “engine” never ran in his lifetime; the only working copy was made with modern equipment after his death. This mean’s Ada’s “programs” never ran at all. It seems in any case they were really Babbage’s programs, with perhaps a bug fix or two.

I hate to be a buzzkill on these things, but there is just so much mythmaking on the Left. It would please me more to write about a woman who truly was a scientific pioneer. Unfortunately, the frauds are much too common – although, to be fair, this particular fraud seems to have been created by men.

Laura writes:

This is very surprising. 

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Quite apart from the effusion of cant in the discussion of Ada Lovelace at The New York Times, the claim that she was “the first computer programmer” is founded in ignorance of the sbject.

This is, to begin with, a matter of dates.  Thus the Times story asserts that Lovelace “wrote the first computer program” in 1842.  But Charles Babbage (1791 – 1871) constructed his first “difference engine,” a mechanical calculator, in 1822; his equations for the setting of the gears and screws in his “engine” were, so to speak, “the first computer program.”

Or we could pass beyond Babbage to the “Anti-Kythera Device,” a complicated calculating machine for determining all sorts of celestial and calendar-related phenomena, which archeology dates to the Second Century BC.  The Device’s probable designer was Archimedes, which would make him the author of “the first computer program.”

I would bet money that Claire Cain Miller, authoress of the Times article, has never heard of Babbage or his “difference engine,” nor of the “Anti-Kythera Device,” nor finally of Archimedes.

Laura writes:

I am disappointed. How many computer programmers are named Ada Lovelace and wear roses in their hair? She seems an excellent role model to me. I think they should still keep Ada Lovelace Day.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

In 1996 when the CBC produced a television mini-series about the last ambitious aerospace project in Canada, the Avro Canada CF-105 “Arrow” supersonic fighter-plane, the script kept scrupulously to aviation history.  Dan Aykroyd played the role of Avro Canada bigwig Crawford Gordon Jr.; Nigel Bennett and John Whittaker played Jim Floyd and Fred Smye, two design-team chiefs.  The producers also cast Sara Botsford as Kate O’Hara, whom the story presented as a key person on the aerodynamic engineering side of the project.  Of course, no such person as Kate O’Hara existed.  No women had worked in any central way on the “Arrow.”  But facts never stand in the way of feminist propaganda.  We might say that Ada Lovelace was the Kate O’Hara of her day!

Laura writes:

The beautiful scientist is the Vitalist Woman par excellence.

Funny this should come up because I just ran across this photo the other day of the physicist Dr. Lisa Randall, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people (of 2013?).

All those wiry-haired, pallid male physicists seem so pathetic by contrast. I want to be a physicist too.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

Concerning Dr. Lisa Randall, the Wikipedia informs us: “Her best known contribution to the field is the Randall–Sundrum model, first published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum. However, the Large Hadron Collider has failed to provide any evidence to substantiate the validity of this theory.”

Obviously the Large Hadron Collider is deeply sexist, its patriarchal circuitry being inherently biased against the affirmation of gynocentric physics or cosmology.

Laura writes:

Absolutely. The physical structure of the entire universe is suspiciously patriarchal too in that it seems to discriminate against the insights of women scientists. But once we have more role models, they should be able to change that.

Terry Morris writes:

Laura wrote: “But once we have more role models, they should be able to change that.”

And you shall surely have ’em m’dear.

As we are informed in the final paragraph of the Times article, two (women) scientists, sponsored by Brown University, are to host a “mass wikipedia editing” workshop for people interested in creating or expanding on wiki entries involving women of science and technology. Their respective inspirations (for organizing the event) may be had by following the link embedded in the Times article.

Grateful Reader writes:

Rather than look to Lady Lovelace as a pioneering scientist, we might view her as a charming and well-dressed lady who served as a muse to the mathematicians. Her interest in their work and her graceful presence served them well.

The world needs more poetical scientists (Lady Lovelace’s term), although perhaps not quite as troubled as she.  (She was abandoned by her father and neglected by her mother.) Nonetheless, many men seem to have been taken by her beauty and poise and skill with language (although not computer language), including Babbage. She did not need to be a scientist herself, only to show interest in science to become the darling of scientists. Indeed, even today, a moderately attractive woman who shows the slightest interest in science and wears feminine dresses, even without the roses in her hair, will be a favorite with all of the young men in physics graduate school. They might even attribute to her, as their muse, their great experimental or theoretical discoveries. (Alas, most men — and women — in science make no great discoveries at all.)

Despite the unjust efforts made by American universities over many decades, the number of female physics PhD’s remains small, and the departments are full of young men (much to the chagrin of administrators.) Therefore, your feminine readers who would like an “Mrs. degree” should consider signing up for some physics courses or at least spending some time in the science departments.  If they are lucky, they, too, might have computer programs named after them.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Mike writes:

Without commenting on the broader issues, I do have a few observations on the recent conversation about Ada Lovelace. There are aspects of the conversation that I find odd.

The first is Eric’s characterization of Ms. Lovelace’s program as a ‘hello world’ program. Hello world programs are very simple: all they do is print the text ‘hello world’, and immediately terminate. This kind of program is typically written by beginning programmers as they learn the basic process of writing software. By keeping the behavior of the program simple, it’s easier for beginners to learn to work with the tools they need to write programs. In contrast, Ms. Lovelace’s program takes on the more complicated task of printing the series of Bernoulli numbers. This is the type of application for which Babbage originally developed his Difference and Analytical engines.

Compared to our current notion of computer, the Babbage designs for his engines were very limited. In fact, they were limited to working solely with numbers: they didn’t have any provision for working with letters and text, or other higher order forms of information. This is also true of modern computers, but modern computers have built in ways to translate between the numbers they work with natively, and other types of information more useful to humans. As an example, the alphabet, ‘A, B, C’ is represented as a sequence of numbers: 65, 66, 67, and so on. This lets computers ‘think’ in terms of numbers, but present them in a way that’s more accessible to the user. The reason this is relevant to Ada is that it is an idea she initially developed within her notes. Thus, while you can argue that while she didn’t write Eric’s ‘Hello World’ program, she did develop the key insight that made it possible to write a ‘Hello World’ program in the first place. Quoting Ms. Lovelace herself:

“The bounds of arithmetic were however outstepped the moment the idea of applying the cards had occurred; and the Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere “calculating machines.” It holds a position wholly its own; and the considerations it suggests are most interesting in their nature. In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.”

Eric’s next point is regarding the fact that Ms. Lovelace’s program didn’t ever run. I think she should be forgiven this point, considering she didn’t have the hardware on which to run her program, and to this day, it has never been built. More seriously, fundamental computer science is often times more about mathematics than it is about directly producing software. The formal reasoning of the mathematics then gives us the tools we use to build the software we use in our daily lives. Coming from an age before computer hardware physically existed, I’d suggest that Ms. Lovelace’s contribution lies more in computer science than it does in software development. This does not make it less of a contribution, just a different type of contribution.

Moving to a later point in the discussion thread, Mr. Bertonneau posts a Wikipedia quote that Lisa Randall’s Randall–Sundrum model hasn’t been supported by experimental work. This statement would have been true for the Higgs Boson from 1964 through its confirmation almost 50 years later in 2012. Engelbert and Higgs recently won the Nobel prize for this work. I’m not saying that Randall-Sundrum will be worthy of a Nobel Prize, but only that a lack of confirmation is just that: a lack of confirmation. It’s unclear what the fate of the model will be, and even if it’s found out to be false, that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t have been useful. Newton’s theory of gravity served us well for over 200 years until it was shown to be partially incorrect and replaced by Einstein’s model for gravitation. This is normal for science, and it is good.

Finally, Mr. Bertonneau refers to a mass Wikipedia editing event, for the purpose of bolstering women scientists’ reputation in their wiki pages. I feel obligated to point out that both sides of the debate have been claimed to engage in this tactic. It is for this reason that Wikipedia should be viewed more as a launching point for further research than any kind of authority in and of itself. Original sources tend to be deeper and more interesting than Wikipedia anyway.

Laura writes:

Thank you for your comments.

As the daughter of a woman who was one of the first female computer programmers in this country and who worked with physicists on calculations for the hydrogen bomb in the days before it was tested, I can attest to the contribution of women to the field.

What is objectionable is the idea that there is something wrong if more women are not involved, especially at high levels.

Jane S. writes:

NYT article says:

“Fewer than 5 percent of venture-backed tech start-ups are founded by women.

Those statistics. . . provide context for recent debates in Silicon Valley, like why Twitter has no women on its board.”

Ha ha ha. Those high tech moguls are all LIBERALS. The founders of Google, Twitter, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Microsoft—Obama-supporting liberals every one. I wondered if that came up in any of their debates.

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