Ada

As regular readers may know, I occasionally like to feature women who weren’t sexually dominant (as far as we know) but were amazing and impactful historical figures. For example, a couple of past examples include Julie d’Aubigny and Beryl Swain.

Today, inspired by this article on the Blue Stocking site, I’m featuring another – Ada Lovelace. Given I’ve spent a large part of my life writing software, she’s a figure near and dear to my heart. Her notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine are the first example of what we think of today as computer programming. They pre-date the work of the equally brilliant Alan Turing by 100 years. From this article…

She then summarises how a sequence of computations would work on the Analytical Engine; with “Operation Cards” to define the operations to be calculated, and “Variable Cards” to define the locations of values. Lovelace discusses “cycles” and “cycles of cycles, etc”, known to contemporary programmers as loops and nested loops. She gives a mathematical notation for them, which comprises the first instance of a recorded software loop.

She then moves on to Note A, wherein she portrays an extraordinary concept of a general-purpose computing machine– a simply unparalleled vision.

Sadly, she died young, aged just 36. Babbage’s analytical engine was never built and history had to wait until the 1940’s and 1950’s for computer programming to return. That historical gap presents an interesting ‘what if’ moment that fiction authors have enjoyed filling.

There is a programming language named after Ada , although it’s sadly not a widespread one these days. That’s a shame, as I’d much prefer writing in something called Ada rather than the unimaginatively named variations of ‘C’ that are now common.

Image of Ada Lovelace as featured in this article on her in the New Yorker.