Introduction

In 1974, the US Department of Defense needed to design a new programming language in order to help run their weapon systems. Their programming languages were fragmented throughout their various computer systems, and it was a pain to develop for. By 1977, the Ada programming language emerged from development, and mothered a love/hate relationship with programmers across the world. It is very popular in real time / embedded systems, and other critical environments.
           
Ada might be an unfamiliar name for a language, but it should not be a strange one. The language is named after Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, one of the earliest pioneers in computer history. Born December 10, 1815, Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, a very well known poet that most know from their English classes, and Annabella Milbanke, the 11th Baroness Wentworth, who took to an interest in the study of mathematics. Unfortunately, the marriage of the couple quickly ran into trouble, due to an extramarital relationship with Lord Byron’s own sister, as well as what Annabella described as frequent bouts of insanity. The resulting environment was not what you might consider particularly nurturing. Soon, the two divorced, and Ada was raised by her mother thereafter.

From http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html

http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/figures/babbage.jpg

Life

Lady Annabella Byron felt that Ada might take up after her father’s wild nature, and sought to do anything to prevent this. Lord Byron, her father, had pursued the rather emotional study of poetry, which she felt contributed to his suggested mental decline. Thus, Ada’s mother hoped to dissuade her of any ideas that would contribute to irrationality, and decided to school her extensively in scientific and mathematical pursuits. Annabella herself carried a love for math sufficient that Lord Byron himself coined her “Princess of Parallelograms.” Ada took it up quickly, like her mother, and thanks to her background in mathematics, eases into to her involvement with computing.

When Ada was 17, she met the inventor of the Differential Engine, Charles Babbage. Babbage is largely considered the great grandfather of computing, who designed the Differential Engine for the printing of maritime tables. He was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and elected as a Fellow of Royal Society, and recognized as a talented mathematician. Ada and Babbage met in high London society, becoming lifelong friends, and spoke frequently upon the developing subjects of mathematics, logic, and science. Ada’s interests were wide and varied, not just math, but also including horses, and music. Her education and nobility, as Babbage’s newfound fame, uniquely put the duo together, and allowed her to participate in a largely male dominated field.

The Analytical Engine

In the process of designing the Differential Engine, Babbage thought of an even grander machine that could calculate anything, not just tables. This was known as the Analytical Engine, which is a precursor to the computer that we know today. For the time, it was remarkably advanced, and included the concept of software, which no other system would have for decades. In fact, no other person would even venture to design the concept for a great deal of time to come. However, in doing so, Babbage was caught up in the grandiosity of his own design, and had little intention of finishing the Differential Engine he was contracted to create by the English Parliament. The result was that when he attempted to secure additional funding for the Analytical Engine, an exercise by which most researchers today are familiar, he was rejected.
Babbage later received an audience with the Italian Scientific Academy, where he encouraged Luigi Menabrea to public an account of the Analytical Engine, finished in 1842. The series of remarkable coincidences in the life of the Analytical Engine didn’t stop with the pairing of Ada and Babbage, as Luigi Menabrea, then a mathematician, later becomes the Prime Minister of Italy. Nonetheless, Menabrea’s account of the Analytical Engine was written in French, and in order to obtain any renown in England, the article had to be translated back. Ada, the prolific daughter of both a mathematical mother, and a father obsessed with words, was gifted with the unique ability both to comprehend scientific and mathematic text, and to write about it in an enthralling fashion.

It was this combination of powers which lead to the exceptional adaptation of Menabrea’s original article into English. The translated article was beautifully written, adapting metaphors, and penning additional passages that allowed the Victorian mindset to fully appreciate the complexity and design of the Analytical Engine. Her descriptions compared the machine to that of “weaving algebra,” emphasized the importance of general purpose computing, and entertained the possibility of generating music and graphics with appropriate algorithms, successfully predicting innovations centuries later.

Contribution

One might consider Ada as the first person ever to write (computer) documentation, a process which is appreciated, but hardly ever reciprocated in computer science. The fact that Babbage didn’t write it on his own can be taken as advice for future computer programmers to find a Victorian noble daughter of a poet to write your documentation for you. Many texts cite Ada as the first computer programmer, which is somewhat of a misnomer. Ada suggested, and described several computer programs to concrete the idea of the Analytical engine, but hardly wrote them on her own. Nonetheless, without her beautiful prose, the Analytical engine would have remained in undocumented obscurity. When Howard Aiken rediscovered the engine nearly a century later, the documents would prove valuable, even if he did not use their full potential.

In 1835, Ada married William King, who later became the Earl of Lovelace, making Ada the Countess of Lovelace. They had three children, and unfortunately, Ada was soon daunted with poor health. She died at the age of 37 of cancer, and was buried next to her father Lord Byron. Her achievements as a pioneer in computer science primarily lie with explaining and stressing a human viewpoint on a mathematical achievement, the expression of the Analytical engine from an emotional standpoint. Like the unique marriage of her mother and father, Ada was the first to marry the concept of the computer, and their application with humanity. Whereas Babbage saw general uses in math, she saw general uses in life.