Ada Lovelace: What did the first computer program do?

Comments

• sbv@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  A contemporary interpretation of Ada’s punch card stack using JavaScript might resemble the following. This version doesn’t replicate Ada’s code for the Analytic Engine but rather reinterprets the algorithm she employed.

  The version of the article I got doesn’t include the code‽

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  • Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah this seems ripped/copied from somewhere. The text alludes to something between that paragraph and the next one.

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    • Deebster@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It is

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    • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Also, that text is barely English. Who wrote that?

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• eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Interestingly, there haven’t been any identified bugs in Ada’s Bernoulli calculation code. Even as she pioneered programming, it seems bugs weren’t part of her invention.

  She got this close to greatness tsk tsk

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  • swordsmanluke@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is apocryphal anyway. There is a bug in Lovelace’s algorithm.

    twobithistory.org/…/ada-lovelace-note-g.html

    The article is fascinating, but if you just want to jump to the end…

    bug

    one line of the algorithm has the variables swapped! It calculates v5 / v4 instead of v4 / v5. Not bad considering there wasn’t a computer to run her code on yet, much less a debugger.

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    • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      yassss

      go Ada!!

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• ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  tl;dr: Answer: not much, it was the first computer what were you expecting

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  • kadu@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    what were you expecting

    Honestly, I think something simple yet useful like a program that could tell us if another program will endlessly loop or will eventually halt. That sounds simple and nice right? We could test our code to see if it will run correctly. Should be trivial enough.

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    • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      💀

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• Deebster@beehaw.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Bad link 👎

  This article seems to be an incomplete pasting of an old article: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do? I was suspicious when it said “A contemporary interpretation of Ada’s punch card stack using JavaScript might resemble the following” but didn’t have any code.

  The real tl;dr is it calculated terms of the Bernoulli series (without bugs!)

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