Rumour has it that deep in the heart of the Pentagon is a network of computers which control the US military, the most powerful army on the planet – rather ironically they are controlled by a programming language named after a hard drinking 19th century mathematician and only daughter of Lord Byron.

As all true geeks will know the language is called Ada, after (Lady) Ada Lovelace. In her work with Charles Babbage on a steam driven calculating machine called the Difference Engine, Ada understood, perhaps before anyone else, what a computer might truly be. As such the Difference Engine is the spiritual ancestor of the modern computer.

Ada, who dined and drank with contemporaries including Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday and who was bled to death by her own physician aged just 36, has been called many things – the first computer programmer and a prophet of the computer age – but most poetically perhaps by Babbage himself as an ‘enchantress of numbers’.

The Ada programming language was originally designed by a team led by the French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah under contract to the US Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the Department.

S Tucker Taft has been heavily involved in the later Ada revisions, and still works with the language today as both a designer and user.

An industry leader in compiler construction and programming language design, he served as the lead designer of the Ada 95 programming language while employed as chief scientist at Intermetrics, Inc., and helped to direct the efforts of a Language Precision Team.

He was technical leader for development of a Static Interface Analysis Tool (SIAT) for Ada on behalf of the NASA Space Station IV&V, and a generalization of this for C++. Recently, he led the architecture and development effort of the Enterprise-Java- and XML-based ‘Mass.gov’ portal for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

He has published a number of papers on programming language design, and software development environments. Tucker graduated from Harvard University, where he has since taught compiler construction and programming language design. He is chairman and CTO of SofCheck.