The Naming of Ada


The Ada programming language was originally christened "DoD-1" by the
general press.  DoD's High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG), however,
never accepted that name, fearing its military overtones might prejudice
nonmilitary users against it.

In 1979, Jack Cooper of the Navy Materiel Command thought of naming the
language "Ada", which was widely accepted by the HOLWG.  The name honors
Countess Augusta Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and the only legitimate
daughter of poet Lord Byron.  While in her twenties, she worked with
Charles Babbage on his Difference Engine and thus is considered the world's
first computer programmer.

Lady Lovelace died in 1852 at the age of 36.


                    The Real Ada; Countess of Lovelace
                  by Carol L. James and Duncan E. Morrill


The following is reprinted with permission from ACM SIGSoft Software
Engineering Notes, Vol. 8 No. 1, Jan. 1983.



It was becoming embarrassing.  The Department of Defense had been working
for some years on the development of the high-order language to program its
embedded computers, but the language still had no official name -- only
informal designations like DoD-1, which no one in the DoD High Order
Language Working Group favored because that implied a language specifically
for military purposes and might inhibit its use in universities and other
non-military spheres.

According to Air Force Colonel William A. Whitaker, the first HOLWG
chairman, many names were proposed, but it was Commander John D. Cooper,
the Navy's HOLWG member, who in May 1979 came up with a name that HOLWG
(representing various government branches) could approve unanimously: Ada,
in honor of an obscure but talented mathematician, Ada, Countess of
Lovelace.

Back in the 1840's, Ada Lovelace had worked with Charles Babbage on his
mechanical computer invention, the analytical engine.  Babbage's hopes for
continued funding from the British government for building his machine were
frustrated after a few years, compounding his technical difficulties -- the
greatest one being that the engine required parts whose fabrication was
beyond the state of the art then and for many decades thereafter -- so that
the computer never became fully operational.  Nonetheless, the Countess of
Lovelace worked out most of its theoretical principles, as well as its
programming, and has thus been called -- with much justification -- the
first computer programmer.

Evidently inspired by Bertram V. Bowden's 1950s computer book, "Faster Than
Thought", which dealt with the work of Babbage and the countess, HOLWG
approved the name "Ada" and received permission from Ada's descendant, the
Earl of Lytton, to use it.  Colonel Whitaker says the earl, himself a
retired lieutenant colonel of the British army, was immediately
enthusiastic about the idea and pointed out that the letters "Ada" stood
"right in the middle of `radar'."

The Ada project is still almost as unfamiliar to most people as the name
Ada Lovelace, but its activities and accomplishments are considerable and
include the Ada language MIL-STD-1815 (10 Dec 1980), Ada for MIL-STD-1750A
instruction-set architecture, Ada-Europe, and AdaTEC of the ACM.

Use of the countess's name seems especially fitting for such ambitious
endeavors since any serious study of the historical record shows that hers
was not some idiosyncratic affliction but a comprehensive and integrated
faculty encompassing the philosophical and the practical.  Her major extant
scientific work -- notes she appended to her translation into English of
the L. F. Menabrea paper on Babbage's analytical engine attest to her
mathematical knowledge and scientific intellect.  About three times longer
than the Menabrea work itself, the notes display mastery of both the
mathematical theory and numerical techniques of Babbage's computing
engines.  England's Scientific leaders of the day -- Michael Faraday, Sir
John Herschel, Charles Wheatstone, Mary Somerville, and Augustus De Morgan
-- knew and appreciated her abilities.

Her father was the poet Lord Byron who, while still a bachelor, underwent
an experience that was to have profound effects upon his only legitimate
child, born Augusta Ada Byron.  At 25, he fell in love with his married
half sister, Augusta Leigh; and to deny that an incestuous relationship
existed between them is to ignore an overwhelming body of evidence,
although his paternity of her daughter Elizabeth Medora Leigh, born in
1814, is less certain.  In January 1815, Byron married Annabella Milbanke,
a puritanical young woman of good family and an amateur mathematician.
Unfortunately, their personalities were incompatible, and a few weeks after
Augusta Ada was born (December 10, 1815), the couple separated.  Shortly
afterward, rumors concerning Byron's previous affair with Augusta destroyed
his reputation and social acceptability, forcing him to take up permanent
residence on the Continent.  However, subsequent letters and much of his
poetry show tender concern for the child he never saw again.  He died at
36, eight years after her birth.

Lady Byron resolved to bring up her daughter (now called Ada, for obvious
reasons) to be as unlike Byron as possibly.  Setting herself up as a
paragon while hinting of unspeakable evil in her husband's character, she
encouraged Ada's mathematical talent but discouraged any traits that
reminded her of Byron.

When Ada was about 14, she suffered a severe paralytic illness -- possibly
of psychosomatic origin.  Unable to walk for almost three years, she
pursued the mathematical studies she loved and became an accomplished
musician and linguist.  Like most young ladies of her social class, she was
taught by tutors -- some of whom were eminent scientists and
mathematicians, such as Augustus De Morgan, a family friend.

At 19, Ada married William King (created Lord Lovelace three years later).
Her mother became the dominant and domineering figure in the marriage,
forming a kind of ruling partnership with Ada's husband -- the covert
reason being that Ada -- whose mercurial Byronic temperament they wished to
control -- must be kept busy and out of mischief.  Together they freed Ada
from many of the usual feminine social and family responsibilities so that
she would have time to carve out a mathematical and scientific career; but,
tragically, the countess's health never allowed her to progress as far as
she would have liked.

After the birth of her third child, and about the time her notes on the
Menabrea paper were published (when she was 29), she began to suffer both a
physical and mental breakdown.  Because she was subject to frequent
digestive and breathing problems, her doctor advised her to use various
dangerous combinations of brandy, wine, beer, opium, and morphine, which
led to serious personality disorders, including delusions to the effect
that her mind -- admittedly brilliant -- could comprehend the secrets of
the universe and make her God's prophet on Earth.

After some years, she came to recognize that drugs were disastrous to her
equilibrium and managed to shake off the addition through sheer will power
-- only to fall victim to a new obsession: horse race gambling.  Since
highborn ladies did not deal directly with bookmakers, she used a servant
and Babbage as go-betweens.  Unbeknownst to Babbage at first, she ran into
catastrophic debt, pawned family jewels, and became the target of
blackmailers who threatened public exposure.  Her husband, when he learned
of her difficulties, stood by her; but consequent family squabbles among
Ada, Lord Lovelace, and Ada's mother brought permanent estrangement on all
sides.

To add to her torment, Ada was suffering from internal cancer, to which she
succumbed in 1852 at the age of 36.  She was buried, at her request, beside
Lord Byron in the Byron family vault.  If there is one bright spot in the
darkness of her last years, it is that she had finally come to understand
and accept her own identity, and that of the father she had been taught to
despise.


                                References

V. R. Huskey and H. D. Huskey, "Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage," Annals
   of the History of Computing, Vol. 2, No. 4, October, 1980.

C. L. James, "Ada: They Named a Language After Her", Softalk, Vol. 2,
   November 1981.

D. L. Moor, Ada, Countess of Lovelace (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers,
   1977)

M. Moseley, Irascible Genius: The Life of Charles Babbage (Chicago: Henry
   Regnery Company, 1962).


                             About the authors

Freelance writer Carol L. James has written a number of articles on
computer subjects.  Duncan E. Morrill, a computer scientist, is the author
of several technical papers on computers and software.  They are currently
[January 1983] at work on a more comprehensive study of the countess's
involvement in protoprogramming.


                          **********************

Flyer H019-1190d
lady-lov.txt

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