as the title says. many people have told me that Ada Lovelace invented the first computer code. as far as i could find, she only invented some sort of calculation for Bernoulli (sorry for spelling) numbers.
seems to me like saying “i invented the cap to the water bottle, before the water bottle was invented”
did she do something else? am i missing something?
edit: ah! thank you everyone, i understand!!
In: Mathematics
So it’s worth remembering that programmable hardware already existed from Lovelace’s childhood. Looms were used for textile manufacture, and they could be configured via increasingly complex series of knobs, levers and dials to create different patterns, thus being — in a strict, limited sense — programmable machines.
Additionally people had been making calculating machines for aeons to make sums easier. The Romans started with the abacus, but things got increasingly inventive with slide-rules and later clockwork devices.
There was a pressure to make these calculating machines do ever more calculations. This naturally led to the idea of a general-purpose calculating machine that could be configured like a loom to do different kinds of calculations. i.e. a programmable calculating machine.
(It’s worth nothing at this point in time people were employed to do maths. They were called “computers”, so such a machine would be a programmable mechanical computer)
Charles Babbage was particularly interested in this, and so made a bunch of machines that did computations. He also sketched out designs for even more complex computational machines, but never quite figured out how certain aspects of their internals might work in his lifetime.
Lovelace wrote programs for machines he’d built, and machines he’d proposed but not fully implemented, based on the specification of what he said each knob or dial would do. The fact Babbage hadn’t quite figured out how he’d make it work didn’t detract from the fact that he’d designed an interface to a programmable computer
One such programme is [Note G](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_G) which was written by Lovelace to calculate Bernoulli numbers (tediously essential in statistics). You can see [a translation of it to C here](https://gist.github.com/sinclairtarget/ad18ac65d277e453da5f479d6ccfc20e)
Lovelace frequently tried to help Babbage get funding to complete his inventions: and her programs were part of that.
Babbage himself was a rather odd man, so he was a poor proponent of his own work.
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