× Home Ada Lovelace Konrad Zuse Grace Hopper
History of
Programming
KEY FIGURES

During 1842–1849, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea about Charles Babbage's newest proposed machine: the Analytical Engine; she supplemented the memoir with notes that specified in detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the engine, recognized by most of historians as the world's first published computer program. The first computer codes were specialized for their applications: e.g., Alonzo Church was able to express the lambda calculus in a formulaic way and the Turing machine was an abstraction of the operation of a tape-marking machine. Jacquard Looms and Charles Babbage's Difference Engine both had simple languages for describing the actions that these machines should perform hence they were the creators of the first programming language.

Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace
Konrad Zuse
Konrad Zuse
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper