Growing up, I never really had heroes. When someone asked, people usually gave a family member or an athlete. These never really inspired me in the way I thought a hero should.
As I learned more about history, especially in mathematics, science and computers, I found that there were people whose achievements were insanely awesome. Moreover, I found heroes that contributed in huge ways to their fields in their lifetimes while being persecuted, challenged or mocked. These were people who accomplished things I can scarcely imagine even in a world that made their lives exceedingly difficult, even impossible.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace
Ada was the only legitimate child of the English poet, Lord Byron. Born in the 1800s, she was part of a world that didn’t have many female scientists and mathematicians like her.
Why was she badass?
Among her many other accomplishments, Ada is widely considered to be the world’s first computer programmer.
In 1842–43, Ada translated an Italian manuscript on Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine, the very first design for a Turing-complete general purpose computer. With the article, she appended a set of notes explaining the Analytical Engine’s function.
This was difficult, considering other scientists did not actually grasp Babbage’s concept. The notes she left were longer than the manuscript itself and included, in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine.
When the first complete Babbage Analytical Engine was completed in 2002, her method was found to successfully and efficiently run on it. Yes, the algorithm she wrote in the notes of a translation she did, for a computing device the likes of which had never been seen and that had not even been built and wouldn’t be tested until 150 years after her death.
Although it is a bit silly, I like to think that one can trace a long line of female computer programmers down from Ada Lovelace. I learned my first programming languages from my mother. I’ll tear apart any chauvinist who says girls can’t code.
The photo is a bit blurry, and you can ignore my abundant freckles. Also, the fact that I appear not to be standing straight.
Here it is, my first tattoo!
For those of you just tuning in, here’s what it means to me.
These are brace brackets: { }
Brace brackets are used in math and in many computer programming languages to define complete sets of things that describe what makes them up. They are often used in programming to contain and separate a section of code that accomplishes something into its own context or function.
To me, it means I know who I am and what I am capable of.
I can’t reach to moisturize the bottom half of them, though. Can I get some help?
Weird. Or not.
If I’m not your cup of tea, that’s cool.
I just became a little amused when I noticed that someone who unfollowed me on Twitter a while ago and unfollowed me on Tumblr more recently still follows me on github. I like to imagine that this person is saying “I can do without your wit and your personality, but your code is so it right now.”
Because this is how socially-minded coders talk. In my head. In the middle of the night.
I’m going to bed.
Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes
I switch between programming languages quite a bit; I often wondered what happens when having to deal with the different syntaxes, does the syntax allow you to be more expressive or faster at coding in one language or another. I dont really know about that; but what I do know what keys are pressed when writing with different programming languages.
This might be something interesting for people who are deciding to select a programming language might look into, here is a post on the answer to the aged question of: Which programming language should I learn?
As far as I can tell languages with a wider focused spread across the keyboard are usually syntaxes we usually associate with ugly languages (ugly to read and code). ex. shell and perl.
You might argue that the variables names being used will alter the results, but as most languages programming have conventions for naming but we can assume a decent spread for variable names. I don’t offer conclusions, just poorly layout the facts. Although the heat map does miss out on things like shift and caps. ex. in perl with the dollar sign. ($)
Whitespace hasn’t been taken into consideration (tabs and spaces) which would have been a cool thing to see.
The data that was used to gather this information was spread amongst various popular Github projects.
Javascript
Shell
Java
C
C++
Ruby
Python
PHP
Perl
ObjC
Lisp
Lisp code here was written by Paul Graham.
- heatmap.js http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/
- Follow me @myusuf3
- RSS www.mahdiyusuf.com/rss
Lisp is kinda nuts. Friggin’ brackets, man.
//This will probably break at some point
My favourite kind of code documentation.
