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Ada: A Life And A Legacy (History of Computing)

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If you are a computer programmer, you should know that the first programmer is often considered to be Ada Lovelace. And her name lives on as a US Department of Defense computing language. (Though that language has gained no traction elsewhere.)

But who was the real Ada Lovelace? Stein has done some solid research into what is actually known and recorded about her. We see a complicated personality. Whose precise relationship to Charles Babbage is still somewhat unclear. Where they lovers? Or just friends? What we have is seen through the prism of Victorian Britain's mores, and the surviving documents are perhaps deliberately ambiguous on this point.

Ada's guesses about software that might run on Charles Babbage's machine were inspired. All the more so because there was no precedent, beyond the cards used for looms. It remains a historical pity that the machine never fully worked. In effect, she could never compile and run her code.