America's Former CTO Remembers Historic Coders (bard.edu) 93
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In her Bard College commencement speech, ex-Google VP and former U.S. CTO Megan Smith revealed to graduates that she gave President Obama a computing history lesson on the same day he learned to code in 2014. "I walked into the Oval Office to do coding with President Obama, and, interestingly, Prince William had just stepped out," Smith explained (YouTube). "They had just had a meeting. I said to President Obama, you know what you and I are about to do is related to Prince William, and he said, how's that. Well, the Prince's wife Kate, her mother and grandmother were codebreakers at Bletchley Park, where they cracked the Nazi Enigma codes...." [Presumably Smith meant to say Kate's great-aunt, not mother — Carole Middleton wasn't born until 1955.]
To be fair to the President, Smith once confessed to not knowing much about computing history herself, explaining in a 2012 Official Google Blog post that she and other visiting tech luminaries were embarrassingly clueless about who Ada Lovelace was in a 2011 visit to England. "Last year, a group of us were lucky enough to visit the U.K. Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, as part of the Silicon Valley Comes to the U.K. initiative," Smith wrote. "While there, we asked about some of the paintings on the wall. When we got to a large portrait of a regally dressed woman, our host said 'and of course, that's Lady Lovelace'... You can imagine our surprise when we learned she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine." One imagines Smith might also have been surprised to learn that many programmers older than Smith were already very aware of Lady Ada at that time thanks to the Department of Defense, who tried in vain to make Ada a household name for decades, but had little success popularizing the Ada programming language, which was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
To be fair to the President, Smith once confessed to not knowing much about computing history herself, explaining in a 2012 Official Google Blog post that she and other visiting tech luminaries were embarrassingly clueless about who Ada Lovelace was in a 2011 visit to England. "Last year, a group of us were lucky enough to visit the U.K. Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, as part of the Silicon Valley Comes to the U.K. initiative," Smith wrote. "While there, we asked about some of the paintings on the wall. When we got to a large portrait of a regally dressed woman, our host said 'and of course, that's Lady Lovelace'... You can imagine our surprise when we learned she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine." One imagines Smith might also have been surprised to learn that many programmers older than Smith were already very aware of Lady Ada at that time thanks to the Department of Defense, who tried in vain to make Ada a household name for decades, but had little success popularizing the Ada programming language, which was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
Coding lesson (Score:1)
I'm curious. Do any of you know if President Trump has learned to code? And if so, in which language would he work?
Since he's considered by many to be the highest-IQ president ever, I assume this would have been an easy task for him.
Life accomplishments (Score:5, Informative)
I'm curious. Do any of you know if President Trump has learned to code? And if so, in which language would he work?
Since he's considered by many to be the highest-IQ president ever, I assume this would have been an easy task for him.
I know many very high IQ people who don't know the first thing about coding. Many scientists and college professors don't know even the basics, and some of the ones that do think making a spreadsheet equation is coding.
There's lots of easy tasks that people just don't get around to learning, or who don't find an immediate need for. I don't repair my own vehicle, for instance, even though many of the people at my local hackerspace think nothing of replacing brakes or fixing a blown head gasket.
To them, it's straightforward and anyone can do it. "Howcome you never learned to do this?"
It's the same with other skills like home wiring and plumbing. Many people shy away from doing electronics, while engineers at Hackaday can make complex electronics boards but can't program a microcontroller.
(Programming a microcontroller is easy! Howcome you never learned to do it?)
I grew up helping my dad wire homes professionally, so electronics - even high-voltage electronics (that can kill) - doesn't scare me.
That's also a skill everyone should have - right?
(Home wiring is easy! Howcome you never learned to do it?)
Trump has a lot of life accomplishments, so I don't think calling him down for not having learned coding is a particularly fruitful avenue for insults.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Being spanked by a porn star with a rolled up newspaper while his wife is home with a newborn baby is definitely a life goal of mine.
Re: Life accomplishments (Score:2)
The only group more exclusive than POTUS is that of those that set foot on the moon.
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Only three people have been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
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FTFY
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True, although not all POTUSes survived either.
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Is there any actual evidence that Obama has unusually high IQ? I mean, he clearly was popular and successful, but that is rather different from high IQ.
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First, I was talking about Trump. Second, we know Trump has a high IQ because he tells us so.
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You'd be amazed at all the things Trump tells you that aren't true yet still somehow help him achieve his objectives. It's almost like the guy knows something about marketing and branding!
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He hasn't achieved a single objective that wasn't going to be achieved if he had not become president. Economy, foreign policy, unemployment. If you look at a graph, he's just continuing the trends from the Obama era.
Trump has made a career out of saying he has achieved things that he has not. And dopes like you are lapping it up because he's sufficiently racist to make you comfortable. A
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He lowered my taxes, he lowered my corporation's taxes, he appointed conservative justices, he's locking up illegal migrants, he's withdrawn from TPP and the Paris accords, he's repealed net neutrality and environmental regulations, and best of all, he's annoying the hell out of Europeans, socialists, and progressives. Are you saying those are just cont
Original Mac Programmers (Score:2)
Andy Hertzfeld
Steve Capp
These two are historic programmers.
I don't know who came up with the event driven architecture, but these two led the way in making it mainstream.
Computer History Museum (Score:1)
There is no excuse for Googlers to not know computer history. The Computer History Museum is a couple of blocks away from the GooglePlex. Both the GooglePlex and CHM are in buildings that once belonged to Silicon Graphics.
Speaking of Ada Lovelace, the second implementation of Babbage's Difference Engine design #2 was on loan at CHM from 2008 to Jan 2016. Hand cranked, you know.
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Speaking of Ada Lovelace, the second implementation of Babbage's Difference Engine design #2
...has nothing to do with Ada, does it? The Difference Engine was a fixed-function unit of Babbage's design. But speaking of Ada, I feel compelled to note that
she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine
appears to be a rather nonsensical view of the events. [salon.com]
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she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine
appears to be a rather nonsensical view of the events.
Not according to a multitude of other sources, including the program she actually wrote which computed Bernoulli numbers.
Eh but you know, I'll take a pissy little article from over the actual program any day!
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including the program she actually wrote which computed Bernoulli numbers.
Which appears to be rather disputed. And even people claiming that she *did* write that one are not trying to deny that it *wasn't* in fact the first program ever for the Analytical Engine.
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Which appears to be rather disputed.
In the pissy little Salon article from 1999, sure. The internet wasn't as good then and it was much harder to search for stuff. The thing is, her notes actually exist and you an go and look at them yourself and see the program with your eyes.
And even people claiming that she *did* write that one
She did write one. You can go and read this for yourself.
Finally, the article is clearly biased.
So there's an introduction and then follows with:
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In the pissy little Salon article from 1999, sure.
Which is citing other authors and sources.
She did write one. You can go and read this for yourself.
Yes, I can go and read things like this:
"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." -- Computing Before Computers [amazon.com]
In articles about male scientific luminaries, they basically never lead with descriptions of fatherhood and family life. But when it's about a femal one, that's the first thing to come up. That makes the article seem very very biased from the otuset. It then goes on about affairs and whatnot. Who the fuck cares?
Ada was a socialite, not a "scientific luminary". So why are these mentions surprising to you? They're very relevant for her life in which math was more or less a privileged hobby.
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Which is citing other authors and sources.
Yeah yeah so does everyone else.
Ada was a socialite, not a "scientific luminary". The debate is whether or not she's a scientific luminary. So why are these mentions surprising to you?
They're not surprising because double standards with respect to men and women do not surprise me in the slightest. They are however utterly irrelevant to whether or not the claims of her contributios are true.
math was more or less a privileged hobby.
Ah well that clinche
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Yeah yeah so does everyone else.
And yet, you still talk about "pissy little articles".
They are however utterly irrelevant to whether or not the claims of her contributios are true.
No, but the discussion of the claims hasn't a lot to do with Ada either, as opposed to the late 20th century/early 21th century social climate. The contributions themselves we understand quite well.
"gentleman scientist" (like um Babbage for example)
Babbage was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He held the same post that Newton before him and Hawking after him. Yes, compared to him, she was a dilettante, in the truest sense of the word. And she was enabled to be that by...guess what, the other circum
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And yet, you still talk about "pissy little articles".
Yes. The article isn't simply a bland list of facts, it has an opinion. A pissy lttle one, but an opiion nonetheless.
No, but the discussion of the claims hasn't a lot to do with Ada either,
Claims about a person's life achievements not having much to do with them? What?
The contributions themselves we understand quite well.
Apparently not.
Babbage was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.
Indeed he was! Something he achieved at age 37, whereas Lovelace died
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Claims about a person's life achievements not having much to do with them? What?
Claims are claims, and facts are facts. It is one thing that we have moderately accurate records of the actual events. We should be happy for that, for we have no idea what we've lost in the accumulated history of mankind. It is an entirely different thing to take flights of fancy off of those records, though.
but that article about Lovelave first talks about motherhood and lovers.
That's not surprising giving the colourful life she lived. Including the booze and gambling. Of course that makes for great headlines.
“Embarrassingly clueless”? (Score:5, Informative)
More like “quick to blame others” for her lack of knowledge.
Here’s what her blog post actually said: ”So much of world history leaves out or minimizes the contributions of women, and so “of course” most of us had no idea who she was.”
Good grief - I went to college in the 80s, and I knew who Ada Lovelace was. How much you want to bet Smith didn’t know about Bletchley Park in 2011, either?
In any case I’m sure Ms. Smith considers herself an expert in the field now, having likely spent several hours reading Wikipedia after her “embarrassingly clueless” European tour.
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Please sir, may I have more? (Score:2)
"America's Former CTO Remembers Historic Coders"
What a heartwarming and deeply touching story!
Please EditorDavid, we need more nostalgia, less nitpicky geekery in our discussions.
The *day* he learned to code (Score:2)
10 PRINT "Now I am a coder! Hail to the Chief!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
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Trump programs in classic COBOL; he likes all capital letters and lots of GO TO's.
Re:Fuck you for trying to sneak feminism in again (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been interested and learning about computer history since the late 70s. Women have always had a place in computing history. No one is forcing feminism here, these are historical people who are very well known and who have had a major influence in areas most programmers are familiar with. If you go back a few decades, women were also well represented in the computing workplace as well.
As for who slashdot is for, it says it there right at the top. "News For Nerds". If you don't know any female nerds then you need to get out of your basement for a bit.
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> If you don't know any female nerds then you need to get out of your basement for a bit.
I'm not the AP above and I do in principle agree with you, but even you have to admit that female engineers are pretty thin on the ground, and to me it seems like that's almost entirely by their own choice. At least every company I've ever worked at has gone out of their way to hire and accommodate women engineers (far more than they would do for guys), yet there just aren't (m)any out there.
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There used to be a lot more women in computing. My first technical boss was the main sysadmin and a woman, I had plenty of professors who were women, and had a woman PhD advisor. I'm not sure what really changed. I still see plenty of women in higher level software, and when I worked on medical devices there was good representation from women. But in more network oriented embedded systems, hardware or firmware, they're much more rare.
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"News For Nerds". If you don't know any female nerds
I had no idea that news for female nerds had to contain women to be interesting to them, but whatever. Anyway, pointing out gross inaccuracies is far from claiming that women didn't have a place in computing history to any reasonable person.
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Where, exactly?
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Hmm, it used to be there. You're right, it's just a site for whatever now.
Hey, how's them Oilers going to do next season? (Score:2)
I think they officially dropped it one or two owners back.
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That explains why I saw CmdrTaco behind the counter of Chipotle.
Re: Fuck you for trying to sneak feminism in again (Score:4, Interesting)
As a student of computers in the late 70s/early 80s I was much more impressed with Grace Hopper and her famous 'nanosecond' (a 12" piece of wire that represented the distance electricity travelled in a nanosecond) and contributions to COBOL, a language that remains in use some 50 years after it's creation, than Ada Lovelace who "programmed" the first non-programmable computer.
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Both are great people, but Ada Lovelace is probably of more interest academically. Babbage had a rough idea of what his machine might be able to do, but Lady Lovelace had idea on how to use it beyond calculations. She spent most of a year translating an Italian scholarly article on the Analytical Engine into English, while including explanatory notes which were much longer than the original paper. These notes described how to program that machine along with a 'program' for computing Bernoulli numbers. T
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Have you ever actually written anything in COBOL? As a computer language It truly sucks. FAR too verbose.
Ah the glory days (Score:2)
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You mean those glory days when programming was considered a menial job and farmed out to the typist pool (all ladies, of course)?
Re: Ah the glory days (Score:2)
You confuse 'coding' with 'keypunch'
Early programmers used coding firm, that were handed to typists, who created punch cards that were fed into the computer to tell the computer what to do.
Trivia point: once a collection of cards, representing either a dataset or a program were completed, they would draw a thick, dark diagonal line across the top of the 'deck' so the cards could quickly be put back in order if dropped.
Her Lineage (Score:2)
Obama shows anyone can have a 6 figure job! (Score:2)
>> CTO Megan Smith revealed ... that she gave President Obama a computing history lesson on the same day he learned to code..
So he learnt to program in maybe half a day? Wow. Here I am, 35 years in, and still pretty sure I don't know everything...
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>> CTO Megan Smith revealed ... that she gave President Obama a computing history lesson on the same day he learned to code..
So he learnt to program in maybe half a day? Wow. Here I am, 35 years in, and still pretty sure I don't know everything...
I'm guessing it was along the lines of
while 1; do
echo "It's all about me"
done
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So he learnt to program in maybe half a day?
That's nothing, Kim Jong-Un learned it in fifteen minutes. And his first program invented the game of Tetris. What a leader!
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Yeah but the probability is that a 6 figure job would represent a pay cut to him.
Re: Obama shows anyone can have a 6 figure job! (Score:2)
I would be shocked if she spent more than 45 minutes in the Oval Office, that's not a slam on the President or Ms. Smith, the President's daily schedule is managed down to the minute most days - to imagine the sitting President, any sitting President has half a day to fool around on a laptop repeating what hundreds of thousands of school children are doing is just silly.
Please! (Score:2)
Being led by the hand through a 'coding' exercise by a former google exec does not impart any meaningful insights into computer programming for a sitting President, or for that matter a classroom full of school children using a printed recipe to make a ball 'bounce' on screen.
That Kate Middleton's grandmother and great-aunt, along with thousands of others, worked at Blechtly Hall (sp) while Alan Turing and friends built their special-purpose computer doesn't make everyone that worked there a 'code-breaker'.