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.
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…
bugone 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‽
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.
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