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One of the great things about Ruby is how easy it is to understand what’s going on simply by looking at the code. This is because Ruby was created to have a more natural language syntax than many of its predecessors, taking the best aspects of Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp (or Listhp, as we like to say ;), and combining them into the beauty that is Ruby.

You might see a confluence of ideas here: language, understandability, and women! Ada is a language named after Ada Byron (Lady Lovelace), one of the earliest women in computer history, having been born in 1815. From reading Dr. Betty Toole’s Short Biography of Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, we begin to wonder whether Lady Lovelace was a science fiction thinker, “In her article, published in 1843, Lady Lovelace’s prescient comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use.”

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper’s body of work is a more recent addition to the fields of computing and computer sciences. In some works she is credited with creating the term “debugging” having found a moth in the computer she was working on. Regardless, she certainly helped lead to the term’s popularity. Owing to this linguistic panache, Hopper believed programming languages should be more like human language and less like machine (assembly) language, and used these ideas to co-create COBOL.

Now, we have Ruby, which, while not created by a woman, embraces the fundamental humanization of programming languages that these early thinkers were working toward. Ladies and gentlemen, lets tip our hats to the memory of these great women in computing. It’s easy to ignore the forest in order to understand the mathematical models behind mapping the trees, but it’s time to step back and take a look at the grander schema. How do we pull more women into the folds of software development? Why is the gender balance so skewed in this field? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

- Naomi