Udo's Techblog

Today is, as you may know by now, Ada Lovelace day - commemorating the lifetime achievement of the world's first modern information technology theorist. Like many of today's geeks, Lovelace's biography shows a life that was heavily influenced by bodily limitations, which in turn may have contributed to an emphasis on mental accomplishments for compensation: the countess had been suffering from extreme migraine attacks and repeated, severe childhood illnesses that forced her to stay indoors and develop her mathematical skills. Also, a profound desire to overcome the insanity and irrationality that she saw in her father, the poet Lord Byron, may have helped Lovelace's fondness of analytical skills along.

Mary Somerville, one of the countess' many acquaintances on the international stage of early science, introduced her to the English inventor Charles Babbage in the year 1833. Babbage had been working on mechanical computing equipment such as difference engines and something called the Analytical Engine, which would have been the first Turing-complete device on the planet.

If Babbage was the first computer hardware designer, Ada Lovelace was the first software developer. The Analytical Engine's design did support machine language constructs such as loops and conditional branching. Though much of the exchanges between Lovelace and Babbage will forever remain a matter of speculation, it is fair to say that Lovelace was one of the very few people on earth who fully internalized the nature of this project - and she certainly was the only one who, by using its language, could breathe life into this concept that later changed the world beyond recognition.

Only 36 years old, Ada Lovelace died of cancer in the year 1852. She left behind numerous notes and algorithms on paper but ultimately her potential, her destiny, remained tragically unfullfilled. Decades later, time was running out for Babbage as well, who was still solving mechanical problems preventing the complete assembly of the Analytical Engine. In the end he died before it could be finished, the machine was never completed, Lovelace's program never ran on its mechanical registers.

It is difficult to say how the world would look like today if she had had, say, 30 more productive years left to fully execute her theoretical work. Certainly, there would have been no necessity for Turing to re-discover and formalize the groundwork of information processing as the building blocks of it were already being used by Lovelace a hundred years before that. Our civilization could have had electro-mechanical computing devices a lot sooner, which in turn would have accelerated science across the board just like it did in the mid-nineteenhundreds.

Maybe, our culture would have been different as well. Today, we are still fighting against the cultural bias that keeps the percentage of women in science at very low numbers. We've come this long way, and we still have not managed to overcome the man's image as a "creator of things" and the woman's role of a passive consumer, especially when it comes to computer science. Luckily, this is changing, but the pacing can only be described as glacial. If you don't believe that, head over to the next university and do a quick headcount of the student body in the CS department.

As we seem to gradually slip into a more conservative age (again), old gender roles are not abolished like we hoped but are receiving a new lease on life. I wish I could say something more optimistic, but the prevailing emotion here is frustration with our culture across the board. What a waste. Imagine what could have been had Ada Lovelace been given just 30 more years to make her contribution. But over 150 years later, we are still wasting so many lifetimes, so many opportunities, so unmentionable amounts of intelligence, creativity and brilliance over a reflexive adherence to a doctrine of what people should and should not contribute purely based on their gender.

Thus, the view into an average Computer Science classroom becomes symptomatic for our entire culture. People are often thinking about concrete steps to get more girls into informatics and that's laudable. But there is a larger problem to see here, and we can't just fix this small leak while we ignore the gaping hole right next to it. You cannot promote faith-based initiatives and expect advances in women's equality. You cannot teach "family values" and expect girls to show up for anything but traditional healthcare jobs. You cannot make "abstinence only" the cornerstone of your ideals and expect a new generation to become well-informed critical thinkers.

It's annoying that it actually had to be said again, but we still are in desperate need of equality. We are not there yet. We live in a society where a woman can become whatever she dreams of, but that is just the basic prerequisite on the way to a truly free society. Now we need to work just as hard to remove the centuries of corruption that still pollute our dreams.