Where this idea comes from
Telling a machine what to do
In 1843 Ada Lovelace translated an article about Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a calculating machine that was never finished, and added notes three times longer than the article. One note set out the steps for the engine to work out a sequence of numbers.
One thing to hold: A table of steps, one operation to a line — a program written before any computer was built.
Why it matters: A machine does what its steps say, not what we meant. When a program goes wrong, the steps are where to look.
In her words:
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.
When your program did something you didn’t expect, which step told it to?