Who wrote the first computer code?

Let’s begin with a story. Lord Byron was a very famous British poet. He was also handsome, rich and came from an aristocratic family. He sailed to Europe leaving his wife and baby at home. He continued writing very good poetry there till he died. At that time, his little daughter, Ada Lovelace was only 9 years old. And pretty little Ada was fated to become as famous as the father she hardly saw, not as a poet, but as the first computer programmer ever!  

How did Ada Lovelace learn programming?  
This is a very valid question, given that there were no computers in 1843 when she wrote the code for the first programme. To understand this, let’s see how Ada began. Her mother did not have a great opinion of her famous husband. In fact, she thought he was slightly mad. So in an age when women were hardly taught Math, Ada got a tutor at home since her mother felt Math and logic will remove any insanity the girl might have inherited form her dad. Ada had an aptitude for Math and Science. One of her later tutors, famous mathematician Augustus De Morgan, noted that the student might become “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence,” someday. 

For whom did Ada Lovelace write the programme?  
Ada became acquainted with Charles Babbage, known as the ‘father of computers’. Babbage was trying to design machines that would be able to tackle huge calculations. One of these, the Second Difference Engine (the first was not completed) worked on a system of punch cards and was capable of returning mathematical results accurate up to 31 digits. This machine wasn’t completed either.  

The punch cards were probably Ada’s idea, and between 1842 and 1843, she wrote the programme for a computer that existed only as a design. While translating an article by an Italian mathematician on the proposed machine, she included the world’s first computer programme as an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers in her notes. She also foresaw that computers might do non-mathematical functions in future.  

Ada died 9 years after writing this program, aged only 36. Her predictions about computers came true after 100 years.