Programming is not a 20th century invention. Ideas behind what we call programming have existed since at least the 9th century. The very term “algorithm” comes from the name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician born around 780 somewhere in modern-day Uzbekistan. The first computer program was written in 1837 by Charles Babbage, even though for a long time Ada Lovelace has been credited for having been the first programmer. Her contribution, a paper from 1843, was far more profound, though: she understood the potential of abstraction – symbol manipulation that goes beyond pure arithmetic. By 1880s Herman Hollerith devised how to store data in machine-readable form, and the first reconfigurable behavior device – the plugboard – was invented, also by Hollerith, back in 1906.

By mid-1940s programming was already a real thing. Scientists wrote algorithms in symbolic notation and coders translated them into binary code. When Kathleen Booth came up with an idea of an assembly language back in 1947 things started to heat up. First assemblers started to appear that automated this job, and as the anecdote has it, in 1953 von Neumann – having discovered that one of his assistants built an assembler – was furious: why waste a valuable scientific instrument on clerical work a human could do?

It never got any better.