Ada Lovelace, the first developer
It’s been 204 years since Ada Lovelace was born, on December 10, 1815, in England. She is one of the most important figures in computer science, known as the first computer programmer. But what does that mean?
Ada was born into an aristocratic family, showed a talent for numbers and language, and studied mathematics and science. One of her instructors was Mary Somerville, the first woman to be admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society. Her most remarkable mentor was Charles Babbage, mathematician and inventor, known as the father of the computer. He invented the Difference Engine, intended to perform mathematical calculations, and designed the Analytical Engine to handle more complex calculations. Ada was captivated by his ideas. Her language skills and her understanding of the Analytical Engine gave her the opportunity to translate a French article on that machine written by Italian engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea. Not only did she translate the original into English but she also added her own thoughts and ideas about the machine. She thought that codes could be created for the Analytical Engine to be capable of handling letters and symbols along with numbers. She also came up with the looping process by repeating a series of instructions. Due to this work, she is often considered to be the first computer programmer.
Unfortunately, Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never built, so Lovelace never had the opportunity to test her programming ideas on it. Still, her ideas found their way into modern computing via Alan Turing. Turing was influenced by Lovelace’s work, and in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, he explored the question of whether machines can think. Lovelace believed that the Analytical Engine did not pretend to originate anything. She thought it could only perform commands that we knew how to order it. Her position was that machines could not learn or create anything original. Turing, on the other hand, thought that the machines could think, pointing out that “the evidence available to Lady Lovelace did not encourage her to believe” that machines could be so capable. Turing, of course, was working a century after Lovelace and benefited not just from all the technological developments and scientific advances since her time, but also from the different culture that he was living in. During WWII, he thought of a machine capable of decoding German communications written by the Enigma machine which changed its configuration every day.
Even though computer science is popularly thought of as a men’s field, its evolution has incorporated a lot of women’s contributions. Lady Lovelace contributed with the first code, while later Jean Bartik, one of the original programmers of the ENIAC computer, helped to develop and codify the fundamentals of programming. Grace Hopper, a mathematician and computer programmer, designed and improved the first compiler for a computer programming language and popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages. Her ideas influenced the development of COBOL, and she introduced the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches and programming errors. Lois Mitchell Haibt helped to develop FORTRAN, and created the first syntactic analyzer of arithmetic expressions. The first woman to win the Turing Award, Frances Elizabeth Allen, spent most of her career working on compilers, program optimization, and parallelization. Another Turing Award winner, Barbara Liskov, developed one of the SOLID principles, the Liskov substitution principle.
The list of women in computer science is longer than people think. Although there are fewer female than male computer scientists, women have made huge contributions to the field since its inception. Hopefully, there will be more and more women in the profession, developing different approaches and improving the field.
What better way to celebrate Lovelace’s birthday than to highlight women in computer science and inspire a new generation of developers?
References:
- https://findingada.com/about/who-was-ada/
- https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/
- https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-of-discovery-and-invention/ada-lovelace-victorian-computing-visionary/
- https://www.biography.com/scholar/ada-lovelace
- https://makeawebsitehub.com/history-women-computing/
- https://www.technotification.com/2018/05/top-10-female-programmers.html
