Great article, does anyone have a breakdown of the programs babbage wrote? It always seemed odd that Lovelace was the first programmer, suggesting Babbage created a machine without thinking how his it could be used.
Lovelace seems to be the first to use loops. Babbage clearly created something first, but without any looping they were by nature much less complex, and so you could make an argument they don't count as programs ("hello world" would only count as a program because the library print function is likely to have some loop in it by this argument). Of course not all of Babbage's programs survive, it is entirely possible Babbage did have loops in some earlier programs that Ada knew of when she wrote her programs. Ada had much correspondence with Babbage, so it is possible she wrote programs before the ones we know of, but they are lost as well, who knows. Bottom line Ada and Babbage were working together (though countries apart) and so would have been thinking about what this new thing could do while it was in design the phase.
You can make whatever argument you want about first programmer. Ada was a smart person who clearly understood what this machine could do and had visions of the future of this machine. Even if you decide she wasn't actually the first programmer she is worth knowing about as an early pioneer.
Ada was clearly incredibly intelligent. I can't source the original texts for Babbage's program, but it does seem that he was aware of loops, and might have implemented them:
"In the absence of other evi-
dence I have had to adopt the minimal default assumption that both the operation and variable cards can only be turned back-
ward as is necessary to implement the loops used in Babbage’s sample programs cited in Ada Lovelace’s notes (originals in L series notations)"
Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published.[19] So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though
This is excellent and makes a good case for Ada being the first programmer, many thanks for sharing. I've also stumbled across the science museum Babbage archive:
