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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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For Ada to be the first programmer, Charles Babbage must have designed the first programmable computer without ever coming up with any test programs for it.

He decided what instructions you'd need, and that you'd need multiple ones, then never thought about combining 2 or more together to do anything, ever.

Then lucky for him, a programmer appears!

I think this is disingenuous. Babbage certainly created the first design for a programmable computer as we know it, and clearly would have given considerable thought to combining instructions together. But if Lovelace was the first person to actually spend a significant amount of time constructing lists of instructions to solve particular problems then I don't think it's unreasonable to describe her as the first programmer.

By way of (concrete) analogy: in the fourth year comp eng CPU Design course I took as an undergrad, we all created pipelined RISC CPU designs in VHDL, and used an emulator to test them. To that end I did input several sequences of instruction to ensure that the (emulated) hardware was operating as it should, with the ALU generating the correct results, the pipeline correctly handling various hazards, etc., and while these might technically be "programs" I was not "programming" in any meaningful way. Like Babbage (and thousands of students before me) I created a design for a CPU which will never physically exist. Unlike Babbage, my non-existent CPU would never attract even a single programmer.

You designed your cpu for a class, long after people had come up with the idea of a programmable computer, and determining what instructions are needed.

Every instruction that needs to be put in hardware adds complexity, so knowing that some operation can be achieved by another one is very valuable. Babbage's machine had memory, if statements and loops - quite an achievement to know these are needed to write algorithms without writing any.

Making a device programmable, rather than hardcoded is an amazing mental leap and also a massive jump in complexity. One that I believe you would only make if you had at least 2 programs you wanted to run

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