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

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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

Computer code is ultimately just a formal description of how something should be done by a machine.

And she described such a process how the analytical machine which charles Babbage planned could calculate the Bernoulli numbers.

Thats pretty different from what we would recognize today as Computer programming, still the idea is the same. Describing how a (universal) machine should perform a task.

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