I do continue to shake my head how people push Ada Lovelace, someone who wrote a paper almost 200 years ago, as the symbol of women-working-with-computers, when the _actual field_ has figures like Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton.

> how people push Ada Lovelace, someone who wrote a paper almost 200 years ago, as the symbol of women-working-with-computers

I've rarely seen anyone champion Ada as a symbol of "Women working with computers".

I'm pretty sure there's a poster of her at my local Microcenter, alongside the likes of Dan Bricklin.

Yes. She's the single aspirational figure people push, most of the time, and it's a bit ridiculous.

> someone who wrote a paper almost 200 years ago

She didn't just write a paper. Her place in history is at least as well earned - I personally think moreso - as Babbage's.

"When Ada wrote about Babbage’s machine, she wanted to explain what it did in the clearest way—and to do this she looked at the machine more abstractly, with the result that she ended up exploring and articulating something quite recognizable as the modern notion of universal computation."

She did so 100 years before Turing.

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...