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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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It is so tiring. And then combined with people saying things like "women dominated early programming and computer science". Agh. I'm sure there were a number of important and talented women in computer science. I'm also pretty sure, from what I know of history, interests by sex, and the breakdown by sex over the 30 years I've been in the field, that it's pretty likely there were more men than women. (Yes, I know much of the original 'programming' work, which was like connecting cables in a telephone switchboard was mainly done by women, as were many of the clerical calculations. That's something different).

The Lovelace one is particularly annoying, since it appears both Babbage and someone else had made algorithms (a word from Arabic from waaay back) before her. But sure, all of the credit is hers, and men have just been stealing the idea from her.

Grace Hopper seems to have been pretty kick-ass. Ada Lovelace too. We don't need to make up shit so that they are even more kick-ass. It's deceptive and sad.

Grace Hopper seems to have been pretty kick-ass.

Still, though, (I'm terribly sorry) whenever I hear her name, I can't help but think something like "secret identity of superheroine The Locust."

'Lovelace invented algorithms' is obviously incorrect, but she did appear to have insight into the applications of the analytical engine that it's designer didn't. I think it's fair to characterize her as the first person to look at the capabilities of a general purpose computer and realize the limitless possibilities.

In meme form:

Babbage:

(slaps roof of difference engine) you can generate so many log tables with this bad boy

Lovelace:

Where we're going, we won't need tables to compute

deleted

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