Without a doubt, technology today advances by leaps and bounds, but it was not like that in the beginning. Below is the story of the woman who is considered the first computer programmer in the world: Ada Lovelace.
Augusta Ada Byron was born on December 10, 1815, in London, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke, who was a poet, mathematician, and writer. From a young age she received mathematics and science classes, with great teachers such as the mathematician Augustus De Morgan and the Scottish astronomer Mary Somerville. It was Somerville who introduced her to the mathematician Charles Babbage, with whom she had a beautiful friendship and a fruitful scientific collaboration. At 17, Babbage nicknamed her “The Number Charmer.”
In 1835 Ada married Baron William King, who later became Earl of Lovelace. For this reason, she is better known as Ada Lovelace or the Countess of Lovelace.
In 1843, Ada wrote the first algorithm to be processed by a machine (Charles Babbage’s calculating machine), becoming the first computer program. She was a technological visionary, she predicted that computers would go beyond numerical calculations, as was thought at the time. She also proposed the use of punched cards to train calculating machines. Another of her contributions had to do with music, since she thought that notes and sounds could be translated into the language of the analytical machine to create more complex melodies.
She died at the age of 36, from uterine cancer. Years later, she created a programming language that was named after her: Ada.
To learn more about programming languages, you can see the article Programming languages, their types, and classifications.
