Not really that influential in the early years of computing, though. As with Turing, she came to popular attention long after the technology had progressed beyond her point.
(The real history of early computing is more like "OK, we can do arithmetic and logic with gears, relays, or tubes, but we need a cheaper memory device." Memory devices were a long struggle in early computing. Things tried in the early years: lots of tubes (huge and very expensive per bit), paper tape (slow), mechanical wheels (expensive and very slow), rotating wheels of capacitors (small), mercury delay lines (messy, hard to keep in sync, temperature dependent, slow), magnostrictive delay lines (same problems as mercury delay lines but less messy), Williams electrostatic storage CRTs (expensive, but the first real random-access device), magnetic drums (slow), magnetic tape(slow, but big), and finally magnetic core memory (fast, random access, but expensive). Then came RAM, and 128 bits per chip, and 1K per chip, and 4K per chip, and 16K per chip, and 64K per chip...)
The book also has a lot of real historical information, nicely interwoven in the comics with the footnotes and end-notes, and they are a joy to read too.
Is actually surprisingly substantive, and addresses (among other things) the correspondence between Lovelace and Babbage while she was working on the Appendix.
Lovelace's algorithms were only first published in 1953, so empirically speaking she is very little more than a symbol, how to do these things were already reinvented and deployed in common use by then. Computing would have gotten just fine without her algorithms (but maybe her cheerleading babbage was important). Hopper's invention of the concept of a compiling language is arguably huge and she really was the first to do it and obviously it made a difference.
I would go so far as to say that I suspect the idea of a compiling language cames more easily from a female perspective than a male perspective of the era/discipline.
"Nobody believed that I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."
margaret hamilton was another highly influential woman software engineer; she directed the team of software engineers that wrote on-board flight software for the apollo missions.
she was just awarded presidential medal of freedom.
interesting article she wrote on the concept of "development before the fact"
(The real history of early computing is more like "OK, we can do arithmetic and logic with gears, relays, or tubes, but we need a cheaper memory device." Memory devices were a long struggle in early computing. Things tried in the early years: lots of tubes (huge and very expensive per bit), paper tape (slow), mechanical wheels (expensive and very slow), rotating wheels of capacitors (small), mercury delay lines (messy, hard to keep in sync, temperature dependent, slow), magnostrictive delay lines (same problems as mercury delay lines but less messy), Williams electrostatic storage CRTs (expensive, but the first real random-access device), magnetic drums (slow), magnetic tape(slow, but big), and finally magnetic core memory (fast, random access, but expensive). Then came RAM, and 128 bits per chip, and 1K per chip, and 4K per chip, and 16K per chip, and 64K per chip...)