Although the ‘Grok is mostly a political / culture blog, I really am a nerd in real life (having spent 30 odd years in the computer industry) and my-now-outdated degrees are in STEM. I stand guilty of not posting this earlier (H/T: to MAKE for reminding me!): Happy Lady Ada day (in honor of the FIRST computer programmer, Ada Lovelace)!
Charles Babbage is credited with creating the first actual programmable computer (all mechanical – no digital electronics way back in the 1840s) but Ada Lovelace was his programmer. She was even more instrumental than Babbage, as she correctly saw that his Analytical Engine could be put to more uses than just plain math problems.
Often, she is overshadowed by a more contemporary female programmer, Grace Hopper (er, that would be Rear ADMIRAL Grace Hopper to me!) who is credited for creating one of the most enduring programming languages ever: COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language). While many now pooh-pooh it for its age (back in the 1950s) in this era of object-oriented languages (like C#) it still is the engine that drives a lot more of the biz world than most IT folks would care to admit to.
Back to Ada – back in the late 70s / early 80s, a new language took hold in the mil world – Ada, a bit of an extension of P/L 1 (my first real complex language (had dabbled in assembler, FORTRAN, FOCAL, and a couple of others before that) and specifically named to honor Ada Lovelace.
