Ada Lovelace - World's First Computer Programmer.

Ada Lovelace Lovelace was fascinated by Charles Babbage's idea for a new mechanical calculating machine, the Difference Engine. In 1842 Luigi F. Menabrea [b. Chambéry, Savoy, France, September 4, 1809, d. St Cassin, France, May 24, 1896] summarized the concept behind Babbage's more advanced calculating machine, the Analytical Engine. Lovelace translated Menabrea's article into English and added her own notes as well as diagrams and other information. She predicted that such a machine, which Babbage never built, would have many applications beyond arithmetic calculations, from scientific research to composing music and producing graphics. She explained how the machine might be instructed to perform a series of calculations. The programming language ADA is named for her, although the countess has only a slender claim to the frequently used label of "first programmer." But she really did write a program, one for calculating Bernoulli numbers--not a mean feat. To celebrate the role of women in technology March 24, has been named Ada Lovelace Day. Augusta Ada Byron was born in 1815, the daughter of Lord Byron she is now known simply as Ada Lovelace. A skilled mathematician she wrote the world's first computer programmes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Years ahead of her time she realised that the Analytical Engine "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.[1] She died, aged only 36, on 27th November 1852. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Image/Circa 1840/Published 24 March 2009 Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. It was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the DoD. Ada is strongly typed and compilers are validated for reliability in mission-critical applications, such as avionics software. Ada is an international standard; the current version (known as Ada 2005) is defined by joint ISO/ANSI standard (ISO-8652:1995), combined with major Amendment ISO/IEC 8652:1995/Amd 1:2007. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who is often credited as being the first computer programmer.[1]