ten dollars says she’s going to twist me pointing out that ada lovelace did not actually invent the computer or programming and therefore men have actually contributed to the development of computers in some way as misogyny somehow
Wolfram is a famous douche and even he acknowledges that she made not just significant but seminal (heh) contributions to computer programming. There’s no convincing evidence that Babbage actually wrote her notes about computing the Bernoulli numbers. She was also from a family of wacky geniuses. It’s not unreasonable to call het the mother of computer programming or something like that.
Hobbes, Pascal or Leibniz may also have been the mother of computer programming, if you look at it a certain way, or Babbage or Gauss.
Contributions to computer programming != wrote the first program
The problem here is that all of rat-tumb agrees on the scope of the actual contribution of Ada Lovelace to the history of computing and to the programs to calculate Bernoulli numbers in particular (http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html). We are just arguing semantics here.
Outside of rat-tumb, some people don’t know anybody else other than Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing (from that movie with Benedict Cumberbatch). What about Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Vannevar Bush, Emil Leon Post, Alonzo Church, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann? Grace Hopper or Barbara Liskov might be better candidates for “Women who invented modern computing”.
Outside of rat-tumb, what does it even matter if she did or did not predict symbolic theorem-provers over a hundred years early? Does it matter if you don’t know what a compiler is, but have strong feelings about the subject anyway?
Is the Bernoulli numbers program a computer program? Did she write it? Did anything before it count as a computer program?
Those questions settle the debate. They’re just super hard to answer in a concrete way.
Yes. No. Probably.
You didn’t read the wolfram excerpt I linked to if you really think she didn’t write the program.
So Menabrea did not?
Nope. He wrote about the engine, but it was her notes that contained the first program. Read the Wolfram article.
Ok. Menabrea wrote something non-Bernoulli as an example program, but suggested Bernoulli numbers. Ada Lovelace published the first computer program. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, if you set the cutoff right.
The real reason people argue about this is because various Feminists use it to attack nerds in the tech industry.
