Facts every computer programmer should know

Dec 02, 2019  3446 seen

Facts every computer programmer should know


In 1613, in the book called The Yong Mans Gleanings the word "computer" was mentioned for the first time. “I have read the truest computer of Times and the best Arithmetician that ever breathed, and he reduceth thy days into a short number.” 
The author was referring to someone who carried out computations or calculations, yet in our days most of that work is done with the plastic and metal tools on people's desks.
Many people wonder how a box of cables now is so smart. 
Now Fronty is going to tell a few interesting facts about programming.

The first computers were powered by steam

In 1801 a power loom was invented, which based the design of fabric upon wooden cards.
In the 1830s, the world was getting full of with a device large as a house powered by six steam engines, which was invented by Charles Babbage who called it Analytic Engine.

Did you know the first computer programmer was a woman?

In 1843, a British mathematician, Ada Lovelace published an English translation of an Analytical Engine article where she added her own valuable notes - on one of them she described an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. 

The first computer "bug" was called after a real bug

An admiral in the US Navy, in 1947 recorded the first computer bug in her logbook as she was working on a Mark 2nd computer.

Actually, a moth appeared to be stuck in a relay. Before it was recorded on her note, the moth had been debugged from the system. 

The computer virus was designed without any harmful intentions

In 1983, Fred Cohen designed a parasitic application that could harm computers. 
This could make the computer make copies of themselves and spread from one machine to another through a floppy disc. The virus was created only to prove it was possible.

Computer programming would be the 3rd most diverse for languages spoken if it was a country

For example, Papua New Guinea has over 836 indigenous languages spoken, Indonesia is the second with more than 700 languages and Nigeria is the third with approximately 500 indigenous languages.

All programming languages that are known to people both in current use and historical ones amount to 698, so if it was a country it'd be the 3rd one in the world.