eli5 how did Ada Lovelace invent “the first computer code” before computers existed?

849 viewsMathematicsOther

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

18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

She came up with the idea that you could create a loop to repeat simple instructions. It’s one of the most fundamental aspects of coding – instead of writing out “take the number 1, then add 1, then add 1, then add 1”, you can write “take the number 1 and add 1 three times”. Instead of there being 4 steps there is now 1. Doesn’t look that impressive in my example but when you’re calculating something like how many dots does a triangle shape with 4098 rows contain it’s pretty powerful just writing one instruction instead of seperately writing out each of the 4098 rows.

You are viewing 1 out of 18 answers, click here to view all answers.