You may or may not be aware, but today is Ada Lovelace Day. If you’re not sure of all of Ada’s accomplishments, Wikipedia offers a fine explanation, but here’s an oversimplified and grossly shortened version: she’s the nice lady that invented programming.
Over a hundred years before the first working model was built, Ada sat down and rationalized an algorithm that could theoretically have been programmed into Babbage’s analytical engine. The algorithm did more than just add two numbers together, and it is regarded as the first-of-a-kind.
In the not too distant future, some 150-ish years later, I sat down in a high school classroom helmed by Mrs. Jenny Negin. I had Mrs. Negin for Geometry the year before, but this year she was teaching a computer programming course using the language Pascal. I don’t remember much about Pascal, but here’s the stuff I do remember:
- It ran in a very old, very slow Mac lab full of Apple IIGs’s (iPhone 3Gs??)
- It was a structured language, with constructs like variables, functions, loops, conditionals, and arrays (having just seen Dolemite for the first time, I of course had to name my array assignment Rudy arRay Moore).
- It could be used to program simple graphics. I don’t remember what graphics I made, but I remember my friend Nick made a game called Christmas Ball, complete with a loading screen and the simplest of instructions: “You are a Christmas ball gone astray… dodge the presents or die.”
- Pointers… ugh pointers.
To be fair, I had programmed before. My Dad always had a computer or two at home, and sometime in middle school he bought me a BASIC book and installed qBASIC on our MS-DOS machine (probably a 386 at that point in time). I remember fooling around with the code in the book and implementing simple stuff like rolling dice and random name generators. After BASIC, he tried to teach me a little bit of C, but I could really only imitate the simple things he showed me.
I had a few years of free time to play with some languages, but I had no formal introduction to programming. It wasn’t until 10th grade and Mrs. Negin’s Pascal class that I really got that formal introduction that has been the foundation for everything I still program today.
So, I’d like to thank Ada Lovelace for having the intelligence, intuition and bravery to step forward and invent programming, and I’d like to thank Mrs. Negin for explaining it so well to us!
