This is a translation from my original post in spanish. I hope you like it!
If we have a look into a tech high school it will be most likely hard for us to find a girl around there, and if we try to have a look at the computing class we may find none at all.
Be woman and skilled in computers is not very common, and despite there are some, computer world is clearly dominated by men. But, what would all those computer guys say if I said that the first programmer in history was actually a woman?
Augusta Ada Byron King was born in 1815 in England, belonging to the aristocracy she had access to private teachers and good education, she focused her studies in maths and ended up working with Charles Babbage and his analytical engine, due to what she would type the first computer program in history.
Ada’s life was marked by the psychological pressure her mother (and her aristocratic environment) made to her. Her mother, hypochondriac and neurotic, bequeathed to her daughter her own ills, pressuring her psychologically and treatening her, -for example, locking her in a room if she had not carried out her tasks- causing her severe paralysis at the age of 14, possibly from psychosomatic causes.
It was precisely due to the paralysis that she focused on studies during the almost 3 years of that illness, specifically maths. This fondness for mathematics came influenced by her mother, who after divorcing from his father, Lord Byron, -renowned English poet belonging to the romanticism-, due to various scandals womanizing and free minded, didn’t want her daughter to get close to anything that had something to do with literature (creative and bursting with the rules), and focused on science and math (more disciplined).
After advancing in her studies, having had several well-known teachers and keep in touch with people like Faraday or Herschel, she began to work with Charles Babbage in his analytical engine. We do not know exactly which was Ada’s contribution to that draft, but her biggest contribution was made precisely when she translated into English the analysis of an Italian mathematician about Babbage’s machine.
Babbage thought it would be a good idea that Ada included her own reviews with the translation, and these (which doubled the original content) contained interesting ideas, from Ada’s visions (predicting that these machines would generate music and even graphics) to the development of an example of the machine operation describing how to calculate trigonometric functions with variables and the first program with instructions that would work, ie, the first program in history. She also created the loop or subroutine and wrote a notation to describe the analytical engine algorithms, that is, the first programming language in history.
Ada signed the article under the name A. L. L. (Ada Lady Lovelace) due to the difficulties on those times, since it was not right for a woman to mess in scientific issues and write articles like that one. Ada’s life reminds me Marie Curie’s, and yes, I was very surprised when I discovered that the first computer programmer in history was a woman.
