Ada Lovelace

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for explicit concurrency, offering tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada is an international standard; the current version (known as Ada 2012) is defined by ISO/IEC 8652:2012.

Ada 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 was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who is credited as being the first computer programmer.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Because of this, she is often considered the world's first computer programmer.

She was born 10 December 1815 as a child to the poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Byron – all of his other children were born out of wedlock. Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever four months later, eventually dying of disease in the Greek War of Independence when Ada was eight years old. Ada's mother remained bitter at Lord Byron and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing what she saw as insanity in her father, but she remained interested in him despite this (and was, upon her eventual death, buried next to him at her request).

She referred to herself as a "poetical scientist" and "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)". As a young adult, her mathematical talents led her to an ongoing working relationship and friendship with fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage, and in particular Babbage's work on the analytical engine. Between 1842 and 1843, she translated an article by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea on the engine, which she supplemented with an elaborate set of notes of her own, simply called Notes. These notes contain what is considered the first computer program – that is, an algorithm encoded for processing by a machine. Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers. She also developed a vision on the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities.