Talk:Ada Lovelace/2015/February

Miscellaneous contributions to the talk page
The opening section says 'She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules ...'. However, 'manipulating symbols according to rules' is not what a programmer does. If she deserves the title of the first programmer, her work should be described to justify that more clearly.

Also, I agree with the 1 Feb. 2008 comment regarding paternalism and appeal to someone to fix that.

I would address these issues myself if I knew enough to do so.

--Jreiss17 (talk) 22:33, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Um, doesn't this article seem a bit paternalistic? Throughout it, it refers to Lovelace simply by her first name, while men in the story are referred to by last name. Either the women should receive similar treatment, or we'll have to go through and change references to Babbage to "Chuck". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.140.122.72 (talk) 14:38, 1 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I assume she is called Ada due to her peerage. Similar as this woman is called Victoria instead of Mrs. Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and this man Napoleon instead of Monsieur Bonaparte. --Cyfal (talk) 17:02, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

At least, I think that's the version...I read it from a mirror while the server was down.

This seems to be getting close to a definitive work now. Thanks for all the contributions and the first two links.

I learned a lot researching this! --Buz Cory

As best I can figure out, Lady Ada was born Augusta Ada Byron, Ada being her middle name. Can anyone confirm this for certain?

There are fragments of her notes on the analytical engine in one of the links I added. These will be put in the /notes page as I get the chance. Does anyone have access to the full notes as published in either The Ladies Diary or Taylors Memoirs? -- Buz Cory

The full article she translated and annotated is online. Link is on the analytical engine page.

I think it is exaggerated to claim that "she anticipated much of what is now taught as computer science". She described a general purpose computer and produced several example programs, that's it. She deserves the title of first programmer. If you look at contemporary computer science, you see stacks, trees, queues, sorting algorithms, graph algorithms, object oriented paradigm, compiler construction, operating systems etc. None of this was anticipated by Ada. --AxelBoldt


 * Thanks. That comment about "much of computer science" was based on the opinion of another. Now that I have read (or at least skimmed) the "Notes" myself, I am inclined to agree with you. And BTW, most of the stuff you mention has been around for four or five decades. Little of it is new.
 * I now have the entire text on my own workstation and will be working to convert it to XHTML, replacing most or all of the images with textual equations and tables. Mebbe sometime next week will have something. Don't see at the moment how this can be easily added to Wikipedia.
 * --Buz Cory
 * --Buz Cory

Is there any reason to believe that Lady Lovelace's writings about the Analytical Engine contain any ideas that were not communicated to her by Charles Babbage, including the instructions for the Bernoulli calculation? -- Hank Ramsey

Yes; during the time when Ada was adding her own notes to the Menabrea article (at Babbage's suggestion), she corresponded regularly with Babbage, and those letters are preserved. It is quite clear from them that many significant ideas (for example, that such an engine might be used to compose music, or draw pictures) were hers, and that Babbage himself required a bit of convincing before accepting her vision. --LDC

Hopefully someone can add these details to the article? - HWR

Babbage speaks highly of Ada in his autobiography, a chapter of which is online at the Analytical Engine page http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/

A brief investigation turned up the following statement by Allan G. Bromley from "Difference and Analytical Engines", in Computing Before Computers(1990), edited by William Aspray:
 * Ada Lovelace has sometimes been acclaimed as the "world's first programmer" on the strength of her authorship of the notes to the Menabrea paper. This romantically appealing image is without foundation. All but one of the programs cited in her notes had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier. the exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she did detect a"bug" in it. Not only is there no evidence that Ada Lovelace ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so.

That's a strong statement, but perhaps not the last word. Is there some more recent scholarship? - HWR

That's interesting and should definitely be included on the main page as "one opinion". Is her correspondence with Babbage publicly available? --AxelBoldt

Another comment, found in Computer: A history of the information machine (1996) by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray:
 * One should note, however, that the extent of Lovelace's intellectual contribution to the Sketch has been much exaggerated in recent years. She has been pronounced the world's first programmer and even had a programming language (ADA) named in her honor. Scholarship of the last decade has shown that most of the technical content and all of the programs in the Sketch were Babbage's work.

Babbage himself wrote the following, in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1846), from an excerpt found in Perspectives on the Computer Revolution (1970), edited by Zenon Pylyshyn:
 * I then suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea's memoir, an idea which was immediately adopted. We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algerbraic 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.

On the other hand, I have not yet seen Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers by Betty Alexandra Toole, Ed.D., of which the author writes :
 * To enable readers to base their own conclusions on the evidence, I have structured Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age to fit the internet age: one-half biography, one-half email of the 19th century. Appendix II contains the latest information about the controversy over whether Ada should be acknowledged as the first programmer and prophet of the computer age.

Is this the proper article title? Shouldn't it be Ada, Lady Lovelace? -- Zoe

Doesn't the quotation from Babbage above contradict the acticle, which implies strongly that her only contribution was to correct a single mistake? Lovelace's contributions may have been greatly exaggerated in recent years, but this article seems to give her correspondingly little credit. I don't have enough experience making edits to do this myself, but somebody should make the account a bit more balanced. Maybe the quote itself should go in the main article. -NRH

"Her husband was William King, later Earl of Lovelace. Her full name and title for most of her married life was Lady Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. She is widely known in modern times simply as (Lady) Ada Lovelace. She is also referred to in some places as Ada Augusta which seems to be simply wrong."

This paragraph is inaccurate, but I'm not sure what the author wants it to say. Her legal name (used only on formal legal documents) would have been "The Right Honourable Augusta Ada Countess of Lovelace" and the name by which she would have been referred to in the most formal of circumstances (on the envelope of a formal letter, for instance) would have been "The Right Honourable The Countess of Lovelace".

She was never entitled to "Lady" preceding her first names, and "Lady Ada Lovelace" is just completely wrong. "Ada Lovelace", "Ada, Countess of Lovelace" or "Ada, Lady Lovelace" would be more acceptable.

I would just change it, but as I say I'm not sure exactly what information the author wants to put across.Proteus 19:29 GMT, 17th January 2004

Doron Swade, in his book "The Difference Engine" states, "Because of her article 'Sketch of the Analytical Engine', Ada's role in Babbage's work has been both exaggerated and distorted down the years, like a Chinese whisper."

"The notion that she made an inspirational contribution to the development of the Engines is not supported by the known chronology of events. The conception and major work on the Analytical Engine were complete before Ada had any contact with the elementary principles of the Engines.  The first algorithms or stepwise operations leading to a solution--what we would now recognise as a 'program', though the word was not used by her or by Babbage--were certainly published under her name.  But the work had been completed by Babbage much earlier."

Swade also publishes several letters from Lovelace, in which she gushes about her own genius. They sound a bit mad, to be honest. She mentions that "Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things, which no one else has; or at least very few, if any. This faculty may be designated in me as a singular tact, or some might say an intuitive perception of hidden things;--that is of things hidden from ears, eyes, & the ordinary senses..." It goes on for paragraphs about her belief in her utterly unique genius.

Doron Swade also quotes "Bruce Collier, whose historical study of Babbage's work remains unsurpassed, has this to say about the popular myth of Ada's role:"

Collier: "There is one subject ancillary to Babbage on which far too much has been written, and that is the contributions of Ada Lovelace.  It would only be 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, this familiar material [Ada's correspondence with Babbage] seems to make obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the 'Notes' than trouble... I will retain an open mind on whether Ada was crazy because of her substance abuse...or despite it.  I hope nobody feels compelled to write another book on the subject. But, then, I guess someone has to be the most overrated figure in the history of computing."

It's disturbing. If gender politics IS getting in the way of objective history* being written then I have a horrible feeling I'm watching history being distorted by modern thinking while I watch (as no doubt it very often is).

Here's a sentence in the article that reads oddly:

"Her prose also acknowledged some possibilities of the machine which Babbage.."

Why is it written like this? If I have an idea, do I suggest it or does my prose acknowledge the possibility of such an idea?

This, and the end of the "Charles Babbage" section, give the impression that we're trying awfully hard to raise her status in the history of Science/Maths based on some heavy interpretation and supposition, but not on evidence.

Show the evidence. It's bound not to be conclusive one way or the other, but the interpretation looks dodgy, and the only way we can be objective is to have the evidence up front, and to acknowledge the existence of controversy, and rather hot-headed opinions on both sides.


 * yesyes I know we could have an argument about the phrase "objective history" - can we agree that I mean history that is done purely out of an interest to discover as far as we can, what happened, and not to prove some point? Probably not....13 July 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.11.234.28 (talk) 13:43, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Not sure where I should put this. I fixed a short but important typo "1842"-->1840 as the year of Babbage's Turin lectures. Further, I'm not sure Menabrea's paper should be called a "transcript". I used the somewhat weaker---and traditional---term "scribed" in my blog article https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/ada-the-amplifier/ but even that is unclear.

Relative to scholarly discussion in this section and elsewhere on this page, my article's two main points of argument are: (1) The expectations under which Lovelace gets muted credit from scholars are misplaced. By modern CS academic standards this is clearly original work beyond the advisor. (2) The issue of how much Babbage had done beforehand needs to be viewed through the lens of Stepwise Refinement (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refinement_%28computing%29), whose need and nature would operate in 1840 no less than in 1950 or 1980 or now. KWRegan (talk) 04:01, 19 February 2015 (UTC)