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Just learned that the first computer programmer was a woman in the 1840s, which I found in a footnote of a library book.
It was Ada Lovelace writing notes for a machine that didn't even exist yet, which makes me wonder how many other foundational coding stories we've missed.
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reese_hayes711mo ago
Yeah but @the_leo is right about lost drafts. The big ideas we know are just the ones that got saved. Makes you wonder what got thrown out.
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kim.nina3mo ago
Honestly it's cool trivia but people make too big a deal of it. She wrote some notes on a machine that never got built, it's not like she was coding Python. Tbh we probably miss a lot of random footnotes about old stuff, that's just how history works.
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the_leo3mo ago
Yeah @kim.nina, that's a good point about how history filters things. It makes you wonder how many other people had ideas ahead of their time, but we only hear about the ones where the notes survived and someone famous later built the thing. The real story is probably full of lost drafts and forgotten conversations.
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