Have you ever wondered what did the first ever computer program do?
The first ever piece of code was written in 1842, well before the first actual machine that could be called a computer (you wouldn’t call it a computer if you saw it).
Author of that program was
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
tl;dr: Answer: not much, it was the first computer 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.
“such simple program is left as an exercise for the reader”
💀
She got this close to greatness tsk tsk
This is apocryphal anyway. There is a bug in Lovelace’s algorithm.
https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/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.
yassss
go Ada!!
The version of the article I got doesn’t include the code‽
Yeah this seems ripped/copied from somewhere. The text alludes to something between that paragraph and the next one.
It is
Also, that text is barely English. Who wrote that?