He wants to out modern feminism as a movement based on emotion and propaganda, not fact.

By firmly planting his argument in emotion and polemical sloganeering ... and thereby showing the unworkability of this approach to discussion? (Pretty sophisticated!)

Google "feminist math". I thought his argument was emotional but also referenced enough original sources to be credible.

It is kind of stupid to think Babbage wouldn't have written programs for his own machine.

That being said, Grace Hopper is one of my heroes. It's like having a black friend so you can feel free to criticize Obama! Haha.

I googled it. Did you mean the first link? It looks well written and interesting from the first couple paragraphs.. The whole list? Yeah, I'm familiar with the topic.

I think the article's author's central premise (to paraphrase: that Ada Lovelace is a phony promoted by other rank phonies for [unexplained, mostly inscrutable but surely, somehow base] political and/or emotional warm-fuzzies) is 110%, really pretty low-grade, claptrap.

Consider the question of Lovelace's role in CS ...

From the perspective of the author of the Ada language[1], call him Jean: he probably must have had some kind of psychic crush on her, right? Any of us (males, I mean) might assume.

From the perspective of later 20th century CS historians, who presumably bestowed the title "first programmer": Babbage was a hardware engineer; of course he designed the assembly language, in tandem with designing the machine; but since the dawn of computing, and still today, there exists a decided, if fuzzy line, between hardware and software "engineers'. And Lovelace owns the innovation of considering numbers as representations of any possible discrete item beyond mere numbers (hm, maybe Leibnitz did this earlier, but that really doesn't count, does it?[2]), which is /key/. So, call them, respectively, first hardware architect, first software programmer. Fair enough?

I think we can definitively settle the question with a time machine - I presume that Charles and Ada would be quite pleased to discuss all such trivia over tea with an esteemed time-traveller. -- Now you have a new, better project that trolling HN threads (jk ;-P).

And no, he referenced nowhere near enough original sources to seem even vaguely credible on such a complex, controversial topic. (See also the first reply in this thread, from jgrahamc - who does give the sense of having actually researched the labyrinthian topic.) And yes, Admiral Hopper. What is with white girls? And how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

No offense.

[1] "Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the DoD." [wikipedia:Ada (programming language)] [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Symbo...

No offense taken. I'm just tired of rah rah feminism. It's so boring. Just stop dividing people along ridiculous lines.

To answer your question, it takes no feminists to screw in a light bulb because they will lobby the government to make some man do it for them.

Except that "out" doesn't really apply. You could definitely critique certain aspects of it (as I regularly do), but he's allowing his own emotion and hatred to get in the way of having reasonable discourse.

Anyone who's looked at feminism even briefly knows that there are lots of issues within the feminist movement, and lots of different ideologies and groups with different goals, and to treat them all as one completely undermines anything relevant one has to say.