This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Kathleen Booth, early British computer scientist, died one month ago on Sept 29 at the age of 100. The Register published an obituary for her titled "RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language."
One month later, yesterday, a link to the obituary was the top (I think) post 1, 2 on both Hacker News and Reddit's programming subreddit
Many of the commenters lamented that they had never heard of this highly influential person, and other commenters suggested that the reason most people hadn't heard of her is because she was a woman.
Ironically, I would contend, the only reason we are hearing about her is because she was a woman.
Calling her the inventor of assembly language may be a stretch. One HN comment points out that the IEEE has already given a computer pioneer award to David Wheeler for inventing the first assembly language in 1949.
You can read her 1947 paper and decide if the table at the end counts as the first assembly language. It is a numbered list of 25 operations, a symbolic description of their action, and in a few cases an English description of their operation. It is, at least superficially, similar to the list of 30 operations Wheeler created for the EDSAC.
Ran out of time to delve into:
Grace Hopper falsely being credited for inventing COBOL
If Ada Lovelace invented programming, and if she did but no one knew about it and it didn't influence anyone else, should we credit her?
Booth's credit being recently discovered/promoted in 2018 Hackaday article
Margaret Hamilton being the only programmer popularly known for Apollo work, despite leading a small team of 3 people.
Hamilton and Booth both marrying their bosses.
All of these women being impressive in their own right, and exaggerating their contributions for Girl Power is a disservice to them.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link