If you maintain that the idea of applying a computation machine to purposes besides calculation wasn't particularly "influential", I question the usefulness of

If you maintain that the idea of applying a computation machine to purposes besides calculation wasn't particularly "influential", I question the usefulness of whatever definition of "influential" you are applying here. Even one of the critics quoted in the "controversy" section of the Wikipedia article (which isn't about how "influential" she was anyway) grants that much to her: > But [Swade] agrees that Ada was the only person to see the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable of expressing entities other than quantities.