Who was the first lady computer programmer?

Answer 1

Ada Byron, or better known as Lady Lovelace, a great mathematician of her time was the first computer programmer who helped Charles Babbage in writing a plan for how the Analytical Engine (a mechanical computer) should calculate Bernoulli Numbers. When the US Department of Defence selected a single programming language that was intended to replace the many hundreds of often obscure and hard to maintain programming languages they were then using, it was named "Ada" to give her honor. (eventually both Ada and C++ were approved for use with Ada prefered and the older languages vanished slowly as weapon systems that used them were retired, replaced, or updated)

Grace Murray Hopper is often credited with being the first female programmer of electronic computers. She worked for the United States military and is considered "The Mother of Programming languages" as she developed the concept of a computer language which was independent of the computer hardware (what would be later be called a high-level language) and which led on to the development of COBOL. (FORTRAN was developed by John Backus at IBM a couple years before COBOL)

Answer 2

Ada Lovelace is widely considered to be the first computer programmer ever, male or female. Although she lived in the 1800s, before the modern computer was invented, she is the first person to design an algorithm intended to be interpreted by a machine.

Answer 3

Some historians credit Ada Lovelace (b. 1815) with being the mother of computer programming. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, she was encouraged by her mother, Lady Byron, who wanted her to get the best education possible. Ada was privately tutored in science and mathematics, which was unusual for a young lady of the 1800s. She was a good student and at the age of 17, she met a British mathematician named Charles Babbage, who had some ideas for inventions, such as a machine that would be able to do mathematical calculations. She began working with him, and by many accounts, it was Ada Lovelace who explained and further conceptualized Babbage's ideas, in articles she wrote about how such a computing machine would work. But because the machine itself was never successfully built, there was no way to test the algorithm she proposed. Still, her efforts have been considered the beginnings of computer programming.

Other historians disagree, however, and they point to different women as groundbreaking computer programmers, many of whom made an impact beginning in the 1940s-- one name that often comes up is Grace Hopper, one of the few women from the 1930s to have a PhD in Mathematics. She joined the Navy during World War II and worked on the Mark series of computers; she created the first computer language compiler. Also, the first electronic, general-purpose computer , called the ENIAC, debuted in 1946 and six women programmed it: their names were Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman.

Answer 4

Ada Lovelace was the first programmer - male or female.

Answer 5

The first woman programmer, and generally the first programmer, was Ada Byron Lovelace. Nicknamed the 'enchantress of numbers', Lovelace wrote the first computer program in 1842.