People like to get pedantic about whether or not Ada's program was "the first program" or not, but it's fair to say that it was at least the first nontrivial program, and that she was the first to recognize both what calculating machines would eventually be capable of (e.g. manipulating text by assigning letters and symbols to numbers) and the inherent difficulty of transforming state in such complex ways (writing complex programs would not be a simple task).
> It’s the intricacies of her program, though, that make it so remarkable. Whether or not she ought to be known as “the first programmer,” her program was specified with a degree of rigor that far surpassed anything that came before. She thought carefully about how operations could be organized into groups that could be repeated, thereby inventing the loop. She realized how important it was to track the state of variables as they changed, introducing a notation to illustrate those changes. As a programmer myself, I’m startled to see how much of what Lovelace was doing resembles the experience of writing software today.
> ...
> One Wikipedia article calls Lovelace the first to publish a “complex program.” Maybe that’s the right way to think about Lovelace’ accomplishment. Menabrea published “diagrams of development” in his paper a year before Lovelace published her translation. Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published. So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though there’s always room to quibble about what exactly constitutes a “program.” Even so, Lovelace’s program was miles ahead of anything else that had been published before. The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching). Menabrea wrote the following toward the end of his paper:
>> When once the engine shall have been constructed, the difficulty will be reduced to the making of the cards; but as these are merely the translation of algebraic formulae, it will, by means of some simple notation, be easy to consign the execution of them to a workman.20
> Neither Babbage nor Menabrea were especially interested in applying the Analytical Engine to problems beyond the immediate mathematical challenges that first drove Babbage to construct calculating machines. Lovelace saw that the Analytical Engine was capable of much more than Babbage or Menabrea could imagine. Lovelace also grasped that “the making of the cards” would not be a mere afterthought and that it could be done well or done poorly. This is hard to appreciate without understanding her program from Note G and seeing for oneself the care she put into designing it. But having done that, you might agree that Lovelace, even if she was not the very first programmer, was the first programmer to deserve the title.
> It’s the intricacies of her program, though, that make it so remarkable. Whether or not she ought to be known as “the first programmer,” her program was specified with a degree of rigor that far surpassed anything that came before. She thought carefully about how operations could be organized into groups that could be repeated, thereby inventing the loop. She realized how important it was to track the state of variables as they changed, introducing a notation to illustrate those changes. As a programmer myself, I’m startled to see how much of what Lovelace was doing resembles the experience of writing software today.
> ...
> One Wikipedia article calls Lovelace the first to publish a “complex program.” Maybe that’s the right way to think about Lovelace’ accomplishment. Menabrea published “diagrams of development” in his paper a year before Lovelace published her translation. Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published. So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though there’s always room to quibble about what exactly constitutes a “program.” Even so, Lovelace’s program was miles ahead of anything else that had been published before. The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching). Menabrea wrote the following toward the end of his paper:
>> When once the engine shall have been constructed, the difficulty will be reduced to the making of the cards; but as these are merely the translation of algebraic formulae, it will, by means of some simple notation, be easy to consign the execution of them to a workman.20
> Neither Babbage nor Menabrea were especially interested in applying the Analytical Engine to problems beyond the immediate mathematical challenges that first drove Babbage to construct calculating machines. Lovelace saw that the Analytical Engine was capable of much more than Babbage or Menabrea could imagine. Lovelace also grasped that “the making of the cards” would not be a mere afterthought and that it could be done well or done poorly. This is hard to appreciate without understanding her program from Note G and seeing for oneself the care she put into designing it. But having done that, you might agree that Lovelace, even if she was not the very first programmer, was the first programmer to deserve the title.