Security News > 2022 > October > Move over Patch Tuesday – it’s Ada Lovelace Day!

The second Tuesday in October is also Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating Ada, Countess of Lovelace.

Ada was a true pioneer not only of computing, but also of computer science, and gave her name to the programming language Ada.

The Ada language, intriguingly, emerged from a US Department of Defense project aimed at "Debabelising" the world of governmental coding, where every department semed to favour a different language, or a different language dialect, making it more difficult, more expensive, and less reliable to get them to work together.

Unlike comments in C, which start with /* and run until the next */, perhaps many lines later, Ada simply ignores anything after - on any one line, so comments can't accidentally run on further than you intended.

At Babbage's urging, Ada also added a series of Notes by the Translator, which turned out not only to be more than twice as long as Menabrea's original, but also more insighful, explaining several important characteristics of what we would now call a general-purpose computer.

Ada didn't seem to share her father's friend's dystopian concerns about Analytical Engines, or indeed computing devices in general.

News URL

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2022/10/11/move-over-patch-tuesday-its-ada-lovelace-day/