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Which came first, the computers or the code?
by durumu 2y ago
Which came first, the computers or the code?
- hughesjj 2y agoCode, unless you count the abacus etc
- sim7c00 2y agoi 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
- nine_k 2y ago(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.)
- 867-5309 2y agoso..the code drove computers
- codetrotter 2y agoCorrect. And the chicken was written in COBOL.
- ed_elliott_asc 2y agoSo that is how it crossed the road
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoNo. It was running on a mainframe. It was JCL that let it cross the road.
- saghm 2y agoProbably 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).
- 867-5309 2y agothe chicken is just an example of an egg-laying and -borne animal. substitute it with the first
- OJFord 2y agoI think that changes the answer by GP's logic though, since then the first egg-layer obviously came before its egg.
- OJFord 2y agoOr 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?
- nurettin 2y agoThere 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.
- tialaramex 2y agoAnd 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.
- wongarsu 2y agoAda 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.
- hackermailman 2y agoWe all know why the Lovelace myth still persists http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/babbage/ada.html 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"
- consteval 2y agoCan'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.
- stevefan1999 2y agoIt 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.