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Ada Lovelace predates her

• tialaramex 2y ago
  Although it is very common for laypeople to be told that Ada is the "first programmer" in some sense, I don't find that very convincing at all. For Ada this was purely an intellectual exercise. Grace's machine really existed, and her insight really works, even if today we would not call what she initially built a "compiler". The machine processes data, the program is data, have the machine process the program. This is recursively meta-applicable, and it's notable that rather than being something higher ups or intellectuals had specified should be done, Grace was being entirely practical. When you write some typescript inside a C# program today and then somehow in a web browser the equivalent code ends up executed by its JS engine, that's all the fruit of Grace's insight just applied over, and over, and over.