BASIC

There is plenty of dispute about who the first computer programmer is, but many have awarded this designation to Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace. She was brought up by her mother and educated extensively in mathematics and logic so that she might avoid becoming a poet like her father, Lord Byron. Her contributions as an early "programmer" are found in her translation of and notes to an Italian article about Charles Babbage's analytical Engine by Louis Menebrea. In this work, completed in 1843, she envisioned the Analytical Engine as a general-purpose computer and described an algorithm that could be used to output Bernoulli numbers. Although the "computer" which Lovelace programmed was never built, and there is evidence that the algorithm in question was originally written by Babbage, Lovelace's project was instrumental in developing the modern idea of the computer program.

The computer programs that followed in the electromechanical and early electronic age of computing were quite a bit less intelligible to humans.