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Comment by durumu | Hacker News Reader

Which came first, the computers or the code?

Ada Lovelace is often credited as the first computer programmer. She died in the late 1800s. Programmable electronic computers didn't come along until the mid 1900s.

Though it obviously depends a bit on what you are willing to count as computer, or as code.

We all know why the Lovelace myth still persists http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/babbage/ada.html "It is often suggested that Ada was the world's first programmer. This is nonsense: Babbage was, if programmer is the right term. After Babbage came a mathematical assistant of his, Babbage's eldest son, Herschel, and possibly Babbage's two younger sons. Ada was probably the fourth, fifth or six person to write the programmes. Moreover all she did was rework some calculations Babbage had carried out years earlier. Ada's calculations were student exercises. Ada Lovelace figures in the history of the Calculating Engines as Babbage's interpretress"

Can't we let women have this one thing? Like... just this one thing? It's fine. Who knows, a lot of time has passed and I'm sure there's many people who "programmed" and never told anyone.

It's fine, let Ada have this. It's dead anyway and we clearly don't have nearly enough women in Computer Science so we can let this one go. We already have 99% of all stuff, we shouldn't get greedy.

Instead of patronizingly giving women a false hero, instead introduce them to a real one: Klara Von Neumann (yes, that Von Neumann) who was the first coder for what we might recognize as a digital computer in the modern sense. She had to pioneer a lot of stuff!

that's extremely patronizing to women

Says who? You, all women?

Ada Lovelace is a real person. What's patronizing about it? We didn't make her up out of pity for women.

(The code, of course; the code drove music boxes and looms centuries before computers. Same for chicken and egg: eggs are maybe a billion years older.)

so..the code drove computers

Correct. And the chicken was written in COBOL.

Probably off-topic, but the chicken and the egg "paradox" always seemed silly to me in the context of evolution. We know that there were birds long before chickens, so at some point, the first bird that we would consider to be in the species "chicken" had to hatch from an egg from a bird that was _not_ a chicken, so the egg came first. (This assumes that the question is specifically about chicken eggs; it's even simpler if you count non-chicken eggs from the ancestors of the first chicken, but the logic still works even if you don't).

There is no paradox, because there was never a non-chicken parent which was so different that we could consider the newborn chicken a new species. It takes thousands of generations to say such things, not one.

You have the draw the line _somewhere_ though, right? If not biologically, at least linguistically we don't call other birds chickens, and we don't call other animals with shared common ancestors chickens, and I don't think that you can argue that the common ancestors of chickens and, say, primates, can be referred to as both "human" without being prescriptivist to the point that you'd be dictating rules that essentially zero English speakers actually follow.

To be clear, I don't disagree with you that my argument makes little sense biologically; my point is that the question itself is phrased in a way that doesn't really parse correctly in a scientific sense. To me, it reads more like a semantics question (i.e. it depends on your definition of "chicken" and "egg) because the only way to get a scientifically precise answer is to expand the definition of "chicken" beyond recognition.

Yes, we need to draw a line and the question seems flawed. Sure, it makes you think, it is funny, but it contains an invalid assumption that the line's width is a single generation. If we assume that the question is about species, it takes thousands of generations for an offspring not to be able to reproduce with its ancestors.

And this "it's a chicken" versus "it's not a chicken" distinction is ours, Mother Nature doesn't care whether these are chickens or not, the chickens do not make such a distinction. Same with particle/ wave duality, Mother Nature doesn't care whether light is a particle or not, that's our model and if it doesn't work too good it's our fault.

the chicken is just an example of an egg-laying and -borne animal. substitute it with the first

I think that changes the answer by GP's logic though, since then the first egg-layer obviously came before its egg.

Or to take it another direction - how do they gestate? At what point can we call it a chicken and when does the shell (assuming that's what would make us call it an egg) develop?

So that is how it crossed the road

No. It was running on a mainframe. It was JCL that let it cross the road.

It has to be the code, since those are the information/ideas that you've written on any kind of medium such as on a whiteboard or on a paper, or better known as "algorithms".

Also keep in mind with the use of "computer" -- in the past real humans, and in paricular a huge batch, are hired to compute log and sine lookup tables on hand. Earliest case of human SIMD by the way, and some would even take to break encryption by breaking and reversing code boxes, hence they are called "computers", and I reckon many of them being females.

Code, unless you count the abacus etc

i heard the first assembler was written in machine code, then that was used to create compiler. machine code u can just chuck into the cpu. its a little less trivial than assembly because its harder to remember but if u know assembly u can learn it easy enough :>. i dont feel this is an unrealistic path sk i chose to beleive it without any evidence :D

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