http://brightbytes.com/images/ada.jpeg

Usually known as Ada Lovelace, actually Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. Born December 10th 1813 in London (then Piccadilly, Middlesex) England. Died on 27 Nov 1852 in Marylebone, London, England.

Daughter of poet Lord George Gordon Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke. Her parents apparently had a brief marriage at the time of her birth and though she exchanged letters with her father she never met him in person. Used the name Augusta Ada Lovelace in her article "Observations on Mr Babbage's Analytic Engine" in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs.

Mathematician who worked with CharlesBabbage on programming the DifferenceEngine and invented the first computer programming language. In fact, Lady Lovelace was probably one of the first programmers.

http://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/ada.htm

She translated an article of Menabrea from Italian to English, but her notes were at least 3 times the original article, being more significant and outlining the fundamental concepts of computer programming, including conditional statements and loops.

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To date, she and Linda Lovelace are the only women to be honoured with programming languages bearing their names; AdaLanguage and LindaLanguage (see LindaEtymology).

''Compared to the legions of men with programming languages named after them?''

[PascalLanguage, HaskellLanguage, EiffelLanguage, TuringLanguage, NewtonScript...]
* the Newton is actually named after a variety of apple, like many of AppleComputer's products

(''see ProgrammingLanguageNamingPatterns'')

I wonder what GraceHopper would say to a language bearing her name?

''She'd probably find bugs in it.''

"Grace" would be a nice name for a programming language though. "Hopper", on the other hand, could only be an EsotericProgrammingLanguage. :-)

''FWIW, in the Operating Systems I class at the University of Dayton, the traditional semester project is implementing a lexer, parser, and compiler for a C-like language named Hopper that our professor put together and named in honor of Grace.'''
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