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→Was Ada really first? Was the Bernoulli program the first program?: Certainly a co-author of the notes and a software development pioneer
"Algorithms" for calculating Bernoulli numbers had been known for some time. But she wrote this "algorithm" in the form of ''specifically realizable numerical operations'' that she (naively, Babbage's design was ''far'' beyond what the technology of the day would have provided) believed the analytical engine could have done. And she used the ''specific ability of a calculating device to make control decisions based on the data''.
"Algorithms" for calculating Bernoulli numbers had been known for some time. But she wrote this "algorithm" in the form of ''specifically realizable numerical operations'' that she (naively, Babbage's design was ''far'' beyond what the technology of the day would have provided) believed the analytical engine could have done. And she used the ''specific ability of a calculating device to make control decisions based on the data''.
==Was Ada really first? Was the Bernoulli program the first program?==
==Was Ada really first? Were the Bernoulli notes the first program?==
The decision to dub Ada Lovelace the [[first computer programmer]] ignores the historical fact that
*Babbage and others also had written “programs” for the never completed Analytical Engine. [http://www.cs.fit.edu/~ryan/ada/lovelace.html]
Also, she was not the sole author of the notes on calculating [[Bernoulli numbers]]. The notes were originally written by another person, and she translated these and expanded upon them. This would make her a co-author of the notes.
There are those who claim <ref>http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/babbage/ada.html</ref> that Babbage himself, or an assistant of his, or perhaps some of his sons, must have written "programs" before Ada did. Issues like this arise from time to time, perhaps most notably in the "calculus war" between Newton and Leibniz, or the "non-Euclidean geometry war" among Gauss, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky. The scientific community generally gives great weight to the act of publishing one's work. If these other people wrote programs before Ada did, they don't seem to have published them, and they are lost. It is not known what problems these earlier programs might have been solving.
There are those who claim <ref>http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/babbage/ada.html</ref> that Babbage himself, or an assistant of his, or perhaps some of his sons, must have written "programs" before Ada did. Issues like this arise from time to time, perhaps most notably in the "calculus war" between Newton and Leibniz, or the "non-Euclidean geometry war" among Gauss, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky. The scientific community generally gives great weight to the act of publishing one's work. If these other people wrote programs before Ada did, they don't seem to have published them, and they are lost. It is not known what problems these earlier programs might have been solving.
She was certainly one of the pioneers of software development, but whether she was the first person to write notes for an algorithm that a machine could carry out is not certain. Nor is there wide agreement on whether such notes constitute an actual [[computer program]].
==Controversy==
==Controversy==