Ada Lovelace: Enchantress of abstraction

I learned that she really _got_ the potential of computing and what it was going to be. In 1843. Crazy.

I learned she had a cat named Puff.

The title is a reference to Babbage's own appellation for Lovelace as "the Enchantress of Numbers".

As soon as I saw the title, I thought, "Oh, Nature stepped in it." But think of how odd it is that here, in 2015, it's considered (by some) inappropriate to describe a woman as an "enchantress." It reminds me of this observation, from Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say":

For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. So odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.

That really should be an article title though.