A closer look
Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician born in 1815, is widely recognized as the world's first computer programmer because she wrote an algorithm for Charles Babbage's theoretical mechanical computer long before electricity was even widely harnessed. She was a visionary aristocrat who realized that machines could be used to manipulate symbols and create music, not just crunch boring numbers. It is a profound historical irony that the foundational concepts of modern computing were birthed by a nineteenth-century woman, yet the modern tech industry is largely dominated by toxic bro-culture and venture capitalists who think putting a microchip in a juicer is a revolutionary act of genius
