Control Option Command

This article was cross-posted on ria.creuna.com.

Hear ye; Codesmiths and Script Artisans. Nay; Hear ye all who labour with keyboard and mouse, for you owe a debt to the singular person we commemorate today.

Ahem. On this day, the 10th of december, a shockingly large number of years ago the First Programmer was born. If this story isn’t old hat to you you might be surprised to learn the bearer of this distinct honorific was born in 1815 in London.
What might also surprise you, a pleasant surprise, is that she was a woman.

Ada Lovelace

Born Augusta Ada Byron she was the daughter of Lord Byron (he of poetry fame and infamy) and Anne Isabella Milbanke.
Her mother, who was not impressed with Lord Byrons debauchery and loose morals focused her education on mathematics and science, forbidding her to pursue the social sciences in order to prevent her from becoming a bohemian bum like her father. At seventeen Ada showed remarkable aptitude in mathematics and her interest continued even after her marriage; Contrary to the custom of women at the time.

Charles Babbage, her friend and fellow math wiz (amongst other things) had been working with logarithms and in an effort to remove uncertainty and human errors in this line of work he conceived of a Mechanical Computing Device to replace the traditional system of the time which were human clerks with the title ‘Computer’; “One who computes”.

Babbage; For all his genius ground work, was severely limited in his conception of the computer. He saw it as a mechanical means to execute mathematical operations with high precision. Enter our heroine Lady Lovelace.

In 1842-43 she translated a memoir of italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on Babbages conceptual machine. Her additional notes were longer than the memoir itself, and substantially more visionary in nature. In these notes she conceived of making the analytical device accept, comprehend and execute commands; In essence creating the first programming language.

Babbage was never able to actually create his machine, and Ada never got to see the fruits of her labour. Vindicated in history her notes are published and distributed today, she has post-humously been awarded a medal from The British Computer Society and the contemporary programming language Ada is named in her honor. As a side note; Babbages machine have later been constructed as per his notes and was found to be highly accurate at mathematical operations.

Why should we care?

Geek holidays are great, and we need more of them. But if you look at the notable dates and personalities in this industry there are two factors that separate Ada Lovelace from the rest.
Firstly; she is by far one of the strongest examples of the long heritage of brilliant people on whose shoulders we stand to todays technology. Secondly: and it’s sad that this should matters, but it remains to be a factor and an important one at that; She is a woman. Our industry is heavily male-dominated. Not only in our workplaces but also in our heroes and legends.
I mean no slight to Alan Turing, Steve Wozniak, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and their esteemed co-idols, but by god; this sausage party needs some dames.

Searching for “Ada Lovelace” yields among other links a page that declares 24th of March to be Ada Lovelace Day and ask bloggers to pledge to write a post about Ada. Since the site seemed defunct after this date I propose that Ada Lovelace Day should be her birthday; the 10th of December and that we geeks make room for it among Towel Day, Blue Beanie Day and PI Day so this amazing historical figure gets the attention she deserves.

Who’s with me?

Further studies.

• The wikipedia article on Ada Lovelace from which most of this post was taken
• iTunes link for “The Enchantress of Numbers“. The episode of the great podcast “Stuff you missed in history class“.
• The difference engine; A site dedicated to the work of Charles Babbage.

Original photo by Flickr user alexerde. Bastardized thoroughly by yours truly.
These two posts by Keith Peters do a marvelous job at summarising an age-old frustration that most ActionScript developers and I’m certain developers in many other languages, have either faced or actively promulgated.
Namely the attitude that while my language is certainly a robust and decent Object-Oriented Programming language, yours is obviously the stuff of programmer playgrounds and can hardly be considered programming at all.
I’ve broadly steered clear of participating in these pissing contests, but I’m sick to death of them and wish the collective programming community would grow the hell up and quit Balkanizing ¹ since we all seem to have flourishing and genuinely resourceful communities in each our camps.

The first post.
The second post that explains the first post to the hard of thinking, but is still worth a read to us really smart folks.

Every once in a while in between loads of spam ¹ someone adds a thoughtful comment on a blog. Nothing particularly interesting to other readers perhaps, just a “Good job”, “Well put” or “Thanks for sharing”. It’s a wonderful thing to anyone that ever puts a bit of heart into a post and if you’re anything like me (and why wouldn’t you be?) you treasure these comments. We raise our voice, sadly, more often in disapproval than support, and the friendly nod or encouraging smile that is so inexpensive to give and so valuable to receive in meatspace is fraught with barriers on the internet. You may agree with someone in a heated discussion but not wish to get involved or publicly make a stand in the matter. You may not want to register or leave your email or you may just feel that wording your approval is too much of a hassle.

Call me a sucker for praise or an insecure sissy if you will, but there’s no denying the basic human need of positive feedback from your peers. Don’t take my word for it, take Maslows.

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