Ada Lovelace : The World's First Computer Programmer, by Beverley Adams - Colin
Beverley Adams’ book, Ada Lovelace : The World’s First Computer Programmer, is about one of the most advanced women of the nineteenth century. Ada, the daughter of the poet Byron, was brought up by her mother, Annabella. Annabella left Byron when Ada was only four weeks old and Ada never saw her father again. Annabella was determined that Ada should not be like Byron and ensured that her schooling emphasised mathematics and eschewed poetry.
Ada met Charles Babbage and saw a prototype of his Difference Engine in 1833, when she was 17. The Difference Engine was a calculator, designed to calculate and print navigation tables. However, Babbage had an idea for an even more complex machine, his Analytical Engine. This was what we would recognise as a general-purpose computer, able to tackle a much wider range of problems, as long as the solution could be articulated as a set of instructions. This is where Ada earned our modern recognition as the world’s first programmer.
A working version of Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never built, partly because he kept improving it and so what had been designed and costed was then abandoned and the costing had to start again. However, Ada was able to write her algorithms without requiring a physical machine upon which to implement them. The algorithms had If…Then…Else logic and Do…Until loops. They were definitely what we would recognise as program designs. I cannot begin to express how inventive this was – no-one else had ever written instructions to solve a problem in this way. Even Babbage had not conceived of using the Analytical Engine in the ways that Ada thought of. I’m a 64-year-old bloke who’s worked with computers since 1978 and Ada is one of the greatest people in the development of computer science – not greatest women, greatest people.
Does this book do her justice? No, I’m afraid not. Adams says she was one of “the age’s most influential women.” She was emphatically important for posterity, but who did she influence at the time? She “lived in an age that was on the very cusp of a technological revolution” – I’d dispute the “cusp” – the Industrial Revolution had started decades earlier and was well underway by Ada’s birth in 1815. I wouldn’t describe her as one of the world’s most respected mathematicians – her uniqueness was not her mathematical ability but the way in which she could write algorithms that could have been turned into programs if the computer had been built. Unfortunately, Adams doesn’t show us how Ada’s work was so ground-breaking.
This is not an academic book; stating that Byron had “a lot going on in his head” and that “he had issues” is lapsing into modern teenage argot. There is a lot of speculation about how Annabella, Ada and others felt and, in my opinion, a lot of padding and repetition. Adams admits at one point, “Of course, this is all subjective.” She states that William King, later 1st Earl of Loveless, Ada’s husband, was isolated from his siblings by his mother (at the age of 28!) but there is no reference for that allegation. Ada visited Byron’s former home and “her emotions were soon aware of a sense of loss.” How do we know how everyone felt? Where has that tale about William’s isolation originated? The bibliography has no books published before 2003 – is the book really based purely upon other modern secondary sources?
Ada, Countess of Loveless, was a very great woman and deserves to be celebrated and better known. However, I don’t think this book explains why – it simply keeps telling us that she was very good at mathematics. It tends to jump backwards and forwards in time without really being thematic.
Colin
