Ada Lovelace Day
Today is Ada Lovelace Day – celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths, which is not really ‘nerd cabaret’, as The Guardian seems to believe.
Ada Lovelace is generally considered to be the first computer programmer, as she wrote ‘code’ for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. The Engine itself couldn’t be built at the time because it required precision in machining that wasn’t available. [IBM later built part of the Engine and it worked as Babbage claimed.]
The ADA programming language, created for the US Department of Defense, was named for Countess Lovelace.
Computers don’t care who writes the code, what they look like, or anything other than the code works. Unfortunately too many people can’t leave their personal hangups behind, so days like this are necessary.
4 comments
thank you!
and while jacques cousteau was the one who made me want to grow up to be an oceanographer, eugenie clark is the person who convinced me that it was possible.
Thank me for what? I’m not doing anything but stating reality. If you can do the job it should be yours for the common pay, that isn’t a gift, it is earned.
It was the way I was raised, and the way it worked in my extended family. The whole concept of a ‘stay at home mother’ is strange to me. The women in my family all worked, most on farms, some on canal boats, and others in factories or offices.
Frankly, I thing everyone’s place is in a home, but everyone has to work to afford it, unless they inherit wealth.
It was the way I was raised
me too.
I’m not doing anything but stating reality.
for which i thank you! there’s not enough reality in some places (and too much of it in others).
Frankly, I thing everyone’s place is in a home, but everyone has to work to afford it, unless they inherit wealth.
i do too, for the most part, though if i could get paid good money to work keynes’ 15-hour weeks, preferably doing science, i’d really like that. some of my science experiments at home when i was a kid made my parents a wee bit nervous. ok, maybe more than a wee bit, maybe a lot nervous.
My brothers and I usually had woods to experiment in, so my parents were not really aware of many of the things we did, which is just as well.
Yeah, making a living doing what you like and want to do, it much better than the people who spend their time and money learning to do something because there is a good chance that you can get paid for doing it. I meant too many people in IT who really didn’t like IT, but had trained for it because “that’s where the jobs are”. And then the jobs disappeared, so they were screwed.
Instead of meeting your needs working 15 hours a week, we have people working 60 hours a week and not quite making it. Things have gone seriously off course.