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Ada Lovelace (a woman mathematician) is often considered as the first programmer.
And ADA, one of the early programming languages is named after her.
I wouldn't say it is a weird fact, but certainly far from the stereotype of what people think of when they think of programers.
I see a lot of people idolize Ada and hold her up like a hero for children to follow, but she was also a Pretty Bad Person™. She was chronically disloyal to her husband (to the point that he left her when she was on her deathbed) and she gambled away all of her inherited fortune.
Yes, she did write some of the first recursive functions for calculating numbers, but even that didn't work out so well for her:
In the 1840s Ada flirted with scandals: first, from a relaxed relationship with men who were not her husband, which led to rumours of affairs—and secondly, her love of gambling. She apparently lost more than £3,000 on the horses during the later 1840s. The gambling led to her forming a syndicate with male friends, and an ambitious attempt in 1851 to create a mathematical model for successful large bets. This went disastrously wrong, leaving her thousands of pounds in debt to the syndicate, forcing her to admit it all to her husband
Kind of makes you wonder how history will remember those whose lives were ruined (and who ruined others lives) by gambling on cryptocurrency in a few generation's time. Loathsome scumbags, or genius programmers?
I think no matter who we worship as heros, you can always dig up stuff that paints them in a bad light. (Lincoln in some of his letters showed that he was pretty racist, and as much as we love Jefferson and Washington as heros, they also owned slaves.)
Even in this modern day, we as a culture had a tendency to put someone up on a pedestal and then tear them down with schadenfreude, or sometimes let them redeem themselves (it just create a nice narrative that sells stories or clicks). (look at what is happening with Elon Musk now.).
Let's recognize the accomplishment of person as pertains to their time and their skills, and by doing that does not means it is an endorsement of all their views and personality flaws. Everyone is human.
I don't know if I'd call ADA an "early language" -- given it was developed in 1980. I think early languages I tend to think twenty years younger than that.
Though to be fair, I'm still disturbed when I see "antique" tags on cars from the '80's as well. I wouldn't put an "antique" license plate on a 1988 Olds Cutlass Ciera... but there it is.
Tommy Hodgins did you know that her father was THE Lord Gordon Byron? He was THE Pretty Bad Person™. I fell in love with one of his poems, just to find out several years later that he wrote it while trying to seduce a cousin who had recently lost her husband. 🤢
Discrediting influential and important people for the (sometimes very) bad parts of their person is such as 2010's thing to do, in my opinion. Do we really care about the financial and moral backgrounds of cultural and scientific figures like Darwin, Curie, Beethoven, Einstein, Edison and Chaplin so much that we would be willing to forget their contributions if they turned out to also have been immoral people? There is a moral line to be drawn somewhere, and in my opinion someone like Kevin Spacey is right around that line, Jimmy Savile has definitely crossed it, while Ada Lovelace has not.
Also, I believe the critique of Ada Lovelace is heavily influenced by the fact that she was a woman. Gambling, infidelity and financial scheming itself does not seem that controversial to me even in a historical context, and I would frankly be surprised if the same wasn't true of a large portion of our male historical "heroes".