1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom
to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time
are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion,
concurrency, or proper capitalization. 1842 - Ada Lovelace
writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the
minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers
to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her
techniques in order to program in UML. 1936 - Alan Turing
invents every programming language that will ever be but is
shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can
patent them. 1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language
that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is
ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism
occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
1940s - Various "computers" are "programmed" using direct wiring
and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs
spaces debate. 1957 - John Backus and IBM