Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

According to my Telerick software craftsmanship calendar, today, October 16, is a day set aside to honor Ada Lovelace, arguably the world's first computer programmer, and by extension all women in the field.  (Although the date seems to vary slightly from year to year, and perhaps from organization to organization.  See findingada.com.)

In the late 1970's, I read a book on "Computational Poetics" that included this bit of verse in Ada's honor, which has stuck in my memory ever since:

At the outset, notice Babbage
And his plan for calculators
And his friend, the succinct siren
Daughter of the poet Byron
Whose quick brilliance, vastly ranging
Stated that a program changing
Could in fact be done between
The program and the quick machine
Emphasizing this would mean
No human hands would intervene
Lady Lovelace thus ensuring
Abstract notions named for Turing...