Of Poetry and Programming - The bond with Ada

This was a post I wrote for the Blogathon contest I participated in a few years ago, for an event hosted by Accenture to commemorate the bicentennial of Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, who could be, in a way,thought of as the first woman in computer programming.

I think it would be a good idea to begin my new blog site with this post, if only to set the tone of a my own experiences in the world of technology.

My argument here rests on the strong belief held by most people that poetry and programming are poles apart; literature neither has, nor can have, anything to do with computers and that they could never go together. A very few of us would allow others to convince us otherwise.

We are almost convinced that a person with a University degree in English Literature, can never have a successful technical career in software engineering.

This was the general opinion a quarter of a century ago. And judging by the reaction I almost always get from people when I introduce myself as an English Literature major, working in the IT Industry for around two and a half decades or so, the scene hasn't changed drastically. Of course there are exceptions, but these are few and far apart. That’s why they are exceptions, you see!

So, whatever resistance I may have felt in my career, has been not due to the fact that I am a woman in a predominantly male profession, but because I am not academically qualified for it, so to speak.

Ironically, this is exactly the point where I feel my connection to Ada begins. We all know now who Ada was, and why she was an exception (with due thanks to the Internet), but long before Google and Wikipedia were even heard of in India, I accidentally stumbled onto her while collecting material for my 3rd Semester term paper on Microprocessors.

Now, microprocessors, like all human artifacts, are not objects created in isolation. So to know why, how and where the modern computer "CPU" originated, I started digging deep into the history of mechanical computing.

Going as far back as the abacus, I traced the contributions of mathematical giants like Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, Joseph Jacquard and Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal and George Boole, until I finally came to Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine. As I read on, enthralled by his other invention, the Analytical Engine, I suddenly stopped short at one name: Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.

She was a close friend of Babbage, and wrote copious notes on his paper. She was the first ever 'computer programmer', with a whole programming language named after her!

She was quite obviously a very talented woman with a mathematical bent of mind.

And there was something else. Ada was special because she was the daughter of Lord Byron; and my first reaction was that of shock.

But gradually as the initial shock wore off, I realized that it's not so surprising after all. Having studied literature intimately since childhood, I know for a fact that art has its underpinnings in mathematics - be it the 'terza rima', an amazing metrical structure sustained throughout Dante's 'Divine Comedy', or the meticulous linear perspective of 'The Last Supper'.

So when I wrote my first program 25 years ago, I actually felt like I was composing a mysterious poem with words and sentences in a strange language, to be fed as 'inputs' to an enigmatic machine, which would 'understand' and 'interpret' it, and produce an 'output'.

And when the 'program' actually worked and returned the correct result, I felt what is defined in aesthetic terms as a 'creative rush'. It was a heady feeling.

It was a great feeling, despite the fact that most of the people around me gave me exactly 6 months to acknowledge my mistake in choosing a stream I knew nothing about, and where I had no right to be.

Which is once again ironic, because I am currently with SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd., CoE Team, managing all major SAP Sybase products, platforms and technologies (Databases, Datawarehouses, Analytics, and Middleware)

As a short Footnote I would like to add that India witnessed a plethora women achievers in the 19th century as a direct consequence of the influence of Western education on the Indian psyche.

I would like to take this opportunity to pay my respects to some of them here: to the poet Kamini Roy (the first Sanskrit Honours Graduate in British India, in 1886), to Chandramukhi Basu and Kadambini Ganguly (the first two women to earn their Bachelor's degrees in Arts from the University of Calcutta in 1882), to the ladies of the Tagore family, to name a very few. Kadambini Ganguly later became the first South Asian female physician to graduate in South Asia. Anandi Gopal Joshi, another Indian lady, graduated as a physician the same year (1886) in the United States. They were all contemporaries of Ada.

To watch the video of the "Being Ada" event click on the link below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX2IChPMywo&feature=youtu.be