Talk:Ada Lovelace/2013/August

evidence in the controversy?

There's some talk of this above, but I don't see anything that conclusively answers these questions: Is there evidence that Babbage really did "prepare" some of the programs A.L. wrote three to seven years earlier? It seems like such evidence should either exist or not exist, and that should largely determine whether we think of A.L. as a programmer in her own right, or just an assistant. Why do we seem to be in a gray area instead? There are plenty of opinions about her one way or the other, but not much explanation of what those opinions are based on. Is there any way some of the evidence (if any) used by A.L.'s detractors can be described in the article? Or, if not, can the article explain why her detractors' opinions are even worth mentioning, when they're not backed up by evidence? Thanks. M-1 (talk) 08:41, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

You make a significant point. To answer it I guess you will have to go to the several sources given. Xxanthippe (talk) 09:07, 18 December 2012 (UTC).

A major issue with this section is several of the sources given are Lovelace and Babbage's letters, along with other authors from which the various quotations are taken. By the last paragraphs it's pretty much pure original research, seemingly to get the point across that she wasn't the 'first computer programmer' and was clearly delusional. As for her actual contributions, most sources including those cited elsewhere in this article seem to credit her with articulating the verbal/conceptual description of the first computer software, and suggesting to Babbage the idea of how the engine might be used calculate Bernoulli numbers. Even if he had already done that technical work (which isn't clear from Bromley's quote), she probably deserves a title like 'first software designer' or something. In which case this controversy is mostly semantic at best, and at worst a cynical comment on Babbage's character as well as Lovelace's. At any rate this section could be more encyclopedic. AveVeritas (talk) 01:38, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

The Ladies' Diary

I couldn't find any reliable source that suggests that her notes were published in The Ladies' Diary. I suspect it was a confusion, perhaps from the book The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron by Joan Baum, which says (p. 35):

Not a prestigious publication like Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, where Ada's translations and "Notes" appeared, the Ladies' Diary was nonetheless a respectable place to pose mathematical problems and sustain debate.

Note that it doesn't say any work of hers was actually published there. Please provide a citation if you have evidence to the contrary.

Thanks! InverseHypercube (talk) 21:18, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

According to The Ladies' Diary Wikipedia article it stopped publishing in 1841, two years earlier. So it would have been difficult. AveVeritas (talk) 02:02, 11 August 2013 (UTC)