Holy shit. I got shivers the moment I realized Sinclair actually finds and fixes a bug from the very first program written in 1843.
In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the
fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering
here is v4 / v5.
1843!
I was recently at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris, and they have several original Pascalines on display. So many marvels packed into a very tight space, it is one of my favorite in Paris and I would highly recommend it. I'm not sure what they have on Lovelace, I'll admit I was pretty overwhelmed with the collection. Their computer collection alone is a museums worth, and they cover much, much more than just computer history (a lot of mechanical engineering for starters). If they don't have this algorithm on display, they absolutely should.
A leather-bound first edition Lovelace including this algorithm recently sold for about $120,000. That actually seems like a bargain when you think about the level of the accomplishment. [1]
I agree with OP that most likely the bug is in the transcription and not present in the original manuscript.
The Army Museum is worth a visit - it is interesting to see a less Anglo centric view of the wars, particularly WW1. The paintings are deeply grim - not ideal if you have young kids.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musée_de_l%27Armée
Probably a candidate for best museum in the world, the Louvre is a great way to completely waste a day with massive crowds, sore feet, food and water shortages, closed exhibits, intense heat and even more crowds. Get a map ahead of time and check that the things you want to see aren’t closed before you go.
If you want to see an outstanding collection of art without having to face the Louvre crowds, try the Musée d'Orsay: a vastly more pleasant experience, IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musée_d%27Orsay
The Pompidou Centre (Centre Georges Pompidou) [1]. It's technically not a single museum, but several, including the largest museum for modern art in Europe (Musée National d'Art Moderne) and IRCAM, which is about music and acoustic research.
If you're into modern art and/or architecture, it's a must-see. The center itself is a beautiful mess of industrial design, and they have everything ranging from modern paintings to furniture to contemporary sculptures to technological inventions.
Two of the current exhibitions are an installation by Ryoji Ikeda [2], which is one of the most superb audiovisual pieces I've seen (you sit in a completely dark room and watch a huge projection) and Coder Le Monde [3], a history of generative art (digital 2D and 3D, as well as physical), computer graphics and visualization. Both are fantastic.
The nearby Palais de Tokyo is also fun, as is the Museum of Modern Art, which is next door to it.
Everyone mentions the Louvre, but it is incredibly crowded and touristy, and the 90% of the paintings are portraits of 19th century nobility. The gardens surrounding the Louvre are much enjoyable than the inside, in my (possibly unpopular) opinion.
The ossuary, for sure. Louvre is a meh. The park adjacent to the Louvre is good-to-go. Wander between the Louvre and Eiffel, there is a brassiere frequented by diplomats. Pickup intramural football (soccer) by the nurses' college just across the river. Explore on foot with only a rough plan is usually the best way to find treasures.
“I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publication of Lovelace’s article in 1843. There are about 24 of such ‘programs’ and they have the identical features of the Lovelace’s famous ‘program’,” adds Swade. The historian says that the new tests are “unarguable” and that they “do not support, indeed they contradict the claim that Lovelace was the ‘first programmer’.”
It really depends what you mean by "program". Would you argue that the Euclidean algorithm from two millenia prior was a program?
Ada Lovelace was the first to realise that the analytical engine would perform arbitrary tasks and wrote programs for those arbitrary task, beyond computational operations. Of course Babbage who designed the hardware had some idea of what programs it could run and presented examples, but he did not have the forethought to go beyond as Lovelace is quoted in your articles, "an original understanding of where the power and potential of computers lay."
There has always been a controversy of how much of Lovelace's work is hers and how much is Babbage's in the Menabrea papers, and I don't think Babbage writing a few simple programs settles this controversy one way or another. Lovelace had unique and original insights that should not be downplayed.
By that definition, Babbage didn't write a program either. He didn't write opcodes. You still need a human "compiler" to translate Babbage's writing into something that could run on the engines.
Btw, this human "compiler" job was for a long time considered to be inferior work and part of the reason why the first professional software developers in mid 20th century were largely women: it was considered clerical work to translate algorithms from paper into computer programs. The Computer Girls is a good article that describes these attitudes.
Looks like you got downvoted into oblivion, but I believe you bring up an important point that needs to be discussed, and that's "intent".
The string "x=1" can both be a computer program, and something intended only for humans to read. The Euclidean Algorithm was written specifically for humans to understand, with no intent for them to ever be interpreted by a machine. The fact that someone at some point did implement it doesn't retroactively make it the first program. Lovelace's "Diagram" was also not something a machine could directly execute. But the key difference was the intention, she specifically intended that her instructions could be interpreted and executed by a machine.
This is already discussed quite a bit in the article:
"Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published.19 So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though there’s always room to quibble about what exactly constitutes a “program.” Even so, Lovelace’s program was miles ahead of anything else that had been published before. The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching)..."
A group working on building an Analytical Engine, discovered that Lovelace’s Bernoulli program almost certainly would not be able to run on the Analytical Engine in Babbage’s notebooks. The “instruction set” was missing some required features.
From what I understand, she clearly understood the limitations of what Babbage achieved and wrote her program to demonstrate the value of extending the hardware in order to run more universal "programs," like the one she writes!
Great article. In some ways it reminds me of Jonathan Blow's presentation titled "Truth in Game Design" [1]
The author is saying that Ada deserves the title of first programmer both because she did publish an elaborate algorithm and because she understood the potential of the Analytical Engine better than Babbage and Menabrea.
Jonathan Blow's presentation is more about that second point and how computers (or rather, sufficiently complex dynamical systems) can "give you something back that you didn't put in".
System theory is nothing new so it might not be exact equivalent of thinking about engines that can compose music in 1842, but it seems to me that it is not a widespread and well-understood concept as it should be, and that the public opinion is re-discovering it mainly through Deep Learning advancements.
Just for anyone curious there is attempt to build Babbage's Analytical Engine started by John Graham-Cumming's Plan 28 project[0]. Currently there is a lot of fragmented knowledge to be collected from the vast Babbage's writings.
To understand the size of the project here is the excerpt from their blog[1]:
>in the context of manufacturing methods Babbage calculates that the total number of teeth to be formed for a store with 1,000 registers would be 1,800,000.
This is really a very gripping piece, and I'm not actually a programmer. It's also interesting mathematically and just as general history, for lack of a better term.
I’m a programmer and respected Ada Lovelace simply because of her having the title of the first programmer. Now I think she deserves more recognition because she also envisioned the modern use of computers in everyday tasks. Amazing.
There is a very lucid graphical explanation of the hardware of the difference and analytical engines functions in a lengthy appendix to The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. I really love this book and I can't recommend it enough. I wish it were adapted into animation! It is historical fantasy of the highest calibre.
This is a great article, and I also found myself shuddering to think what would happen if the world ever saw the first program I ever wrote (whatever that was).
Even the horrible crap I wrote as an novice is probably less embarrassing to me that the stuff I wrote as a journeyman who shoulda known better.
Thankfully, the most embarrassing things are, like, spending 2 days configuring postfix and not realizing that I could just read the log files and it tells me specifically what isn't working. A valuable lesson, but embarrassment has its cost.
Discovering that I could write my own programs with debug.com was earth shaking. Picked up some decade old book on it at Half Price Books (which went well with my decade old machine -- an 80s model IBM with integrated monochrome green screen) and never looked back.
Yes! I remember my first experience with a PC in the 80s was with a Robotron 8086 PC. It did emanate a smell and I could hear interesting mechanical sounds from inside. The motherboard was huge and it had a small 14 inch monochrome green monitor on top of it.
The first assembly program I wrote and got paid a handsome sum for:
jmp FFF0
The client was amazed that I'd figured out a way to automate the ctrl-alt-del monkeys that had been hired to reboot everyones machines, for some reason, every night ..
Babbage's notes describe what we would call branch-if-zero and branch-if-negative instructions which you could use to implement repetition. Control flow was the least well developed part of the instruction set though, presumably because it would be trivial to implement compared to the arithmetic operations so it could wait.
It's really just a series of mathematical steps with a store of values in between. Notions that would have clearly taken it from being a series of mathematical steps, to a program, such as branching, looping, or jumping are left completely unspecified. So her 'loop' was specified literally as "here follows a repetition of operations 13-23".
In other words, "should repeat" is left an as exercise to the reader.
It's easy to be dismissive from today's perspective, but I think it adequately conveys the algorithm. As I don't think Babbage ever published an instruction set I'm not sure it could have gone a lot further.
I was recently at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris, and they have several original Pascalines on display. So many marvels packed into a very tight space, it is one of my favorite in Paris and I would highly recommend it. I'm not sure what they have on Lovelace, I'll admit I was pretty overwhelmed with the collection. Their computer collection alone is a museums worth, and they cover much, much more than just computer history (a lot of mechanical engineering for starters). If they don't have this algorithm on display, they absolutely should.
A leather-bound first edition Lovelace including this algorithm recently sold for about $120,000. That actually seems like a bargain when you think about the level of the accomplishment. [1]
I agree with OP that most likely the bug is in the transcription and not present in the original manuscript.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/24/ada-lovelace-f...