Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace

theodp writes: To commemorate the 200th birthday of Ada Lovelace, Google's CS Education in Media Program partnered with YouTube Kids on Happy Birthday Ada! for Computer Science Education Week. For those seeking (much!) more information on The Enchantress of Numbers, Stephen Wolfram has penned a pretty epic blog post, Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace. "Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago today," Wolfram begins. "To some she is a great hero in the history of computing; to others an overestimated minor figure. I've been curious for a long time what the real story is. And in preparation for her bicentennial, I decided to try to solve what for me has always been the 'mystery of Ada'." If you're not up for the full 12,000+ word read, skip to "The Final Story" for the TL;DR summary.

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tl;dr

[phantomfive]

This article is good because Ada is the most controversial person in computer science. Some people claim she was a genius who invented computer programming, and others claim she was a fraud (Babbage told her what to write), gambler, and opium addict. Wolfram spent a lot of time reading through the original documents to figure it out.

According to Wolfram, she was educationally at the level of around a PhD candidate working on a thesis. She had gotten to the cutting edge of math knowledge of the time, and then had started working with Babbage, with him being kind of like an adviser. Looking at the machine, she did have some fresh perspective and ideas (like you would expect of a high-quality PhD candidate), and she did understand how the Analytic Machine worked. Wolfram predicts that if she had stayed alive, they would have been able to finish the Analytic Machine (Babbage was horrible at project management, and he would have helped her with that).

Ada comes out looking really good. She was not a fraud, and she did understand what she was doing. Unfortunately, you can't really call her the "first programmer," or the "first person to write a paper on Computer Science," but that's ok. She was a bright, energetic person, with some interesting ideas, who died too young to really investigate them deeply.