Scott Berkun

Ada Lovelace Could Kick Your Ass

Few people know that Ada Lovelace was likely the first computer programmer in history. She worked with Charles Babbage, a man who is most famous for making a machine that didn’t quite work. A testament to the role of failure in the making of every success. One challenge she faced is that given that his computer, known as the Babbage engine, wasn’t quite working, she had to write a virtual program. That’s right. She wrote code for a system that didn’t quite exist yet (To be specific, she translated a paper from French to English and in doing so added notes, which included a program – her actual translation, and notes, are here). Not too shabby.  If you complain about your compiler being slow, or about web standards not being followed, take a humility pill. At least the stuff you hate actually exists. I just try and imagine the conversations she must have had with her friends in 1843.

Friend: So Ada, what did you do yesterday? I went for a horse ride and picked some flowers. Ada: “Oh that sounds fun. Well, I translated a paper about a lecture, written about a new application of math to make a machine that can do complex computations on its own  and just for fun and I wrote up the instruction set to compute Bernoulli numbers automatically on this machine. Which doesn’t exist yet.” Friend: <silence> That’s nice. Go for a horse ride?

Perhaps if you’re truly an innovator, you often have trouble explaining what you’re doing. Sadly Ada died young, at age 36. The programming language Ada was named after her. One of my favorite quote from her famous note is this

:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

She was writing about Babbage’s machine, but boy does it seem relevant to all the technologies we make. Ada was born on March 24th -  Some folks celebrate March 24th as Ada Lovelace day.

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• 6 Comments » | Posted Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 11:16 am in history, Innovation