Ada Lovelace text message story: Ada fixes Babbage's code
A short, funny Discord-style chat starring Ada Lovelace (1815 to 1852), English mathematician, with Charles Babbage. The first person to write a program meets the oldest developer experience there is: a colleague whose machine prints nonsense and who has no idea why.
Read the chat
- Charles Babbage: Ada, the engine printed nonsense again
- Ada: what did you feed it
- Charles Babbage: the cards in order
- Ada: which order
- Charles Babbage: the order I found them
- Ada: Charles. the loop is on the wrong card
- Charles Babbage: how did you see that
- Ada: I read all 40 cards on the train
- Charles Babbage: I will buy you a very large notebook
- Ada: I want the credit in the paper
Free to try, no account needed until you export.
Who was Ada Lovelace?
- In 1843 she published notes on Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers.
- That method is often called the first published computer program.
- She was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron.
The chat is invented. Ada Lovelace never sent these messages, and the story is labelled as fiction wherever it appears.
How this chat is built
It runs 10 messages between Charles Babbage and Ada. Charles Babbage writes 5 of them. The longest line is “Charles. the loop is on the wrong card” (Ada) and the shortest is “which order” (Ada). The word “order” comes back 3 times, which is where the rhythm of the joke comes from. It closes on “I want the credit in the paper” from Ada.
It is shown in the Discord look , one of the Discord-style chat tools. In the editor you can switch it to any other look and the whole conversation follows.