Remembering Ada

October 13th is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada is a historical figure I find fascinating, generally being credited as not only the first computer programmer but also the first to make the conceptual leap that computing devices could be used for more than just number crunching. She led an interesting (albeit somewhat privileged) life – she was the daughter of Lord Byron, became Countess Lovelace and was an acquaintance of Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday.

But it is her work with Charles Babbage for which she is most famous. In 1842/43 she translated a transcript of one of his lectures on his second proposed machine – the Analytical Engine – from French to English. She produced a series of notes in addition, which explained how the machine would work and included a method for performing particular calculations using the Engine (which unfortunately was never built). It is this method which is recognised as the first computer program (there are some disagreements about this, as might be expected with any historical event). I think this was an amazing feat given how many years it came about so many years before the modern computing era.

Coincidentally, my first exposure to Unix was at University doing programming exercises in Ada the language (a long time ago now) which was named in her honour. I suspect Ada’s program was much better than my efforts!

At the time of writing I’m planning on attending a local Ada event being run by one of my clients to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). I’ve talked before in this column about trying to help women who want careers as Sysadmins/DevOps engineers – I’ll be offering to assist anyone I can while I’m there, and I encourage readers to look for local events and do the same! jolyon.brown@gmail.com.