A brief history of programming

A programmable computer needs to be, well, programmed. So, of course, the history of programming goes hand in hand with the evolution of computers.

In 1833, Charles Babbage met Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron. She became very impressed and interested in Babbage's plans for his programmable machines, and their collaboration began. Among other things, she wrote some notes outlining her ideas for how the Babbage Analytical Engine could be programmed. We can call her the inventor of programming, even if we had to wait over 100 years until we had the machine that could make her ideas come true. Her status today is summarized in a History Extra article, from 2017, by James Essinger:

Today, Ada is quite rightly seen as an icon of feminist scientific achievement, a heroine of the mind, and one of the earliest visionaries in the early history of the computer.

In her notes, Lovelace did a couple of remarkable things. The first was that...