Little-Known Facts: The First Programmer
It is generally believed that the first “programmer”, in the modern sense of the word, was Ada Lovelace, who wrote theoretical code for Charles Babbage’s never-built analytical engine. But this is untrue. The first programmer was, in fact, Mad Annie Splatterkill, born in 1562, a prolific and insane serial killer who, when she wasn’t roaming the streets of Elizabethan London eviscerating gentlemen and eating their wives, spent her time writing the first known instance of a binary sort, devising increasingly elegant Fibonacci sequence generators, and expounding at some length on the relative merits of tail recursion. Unfortunately, her audience was more often than not (1) illiterate; (2) unversed in the finer points of computational theory; and (3) headless. The only known record of her considerable brilliance is preserved in a flat in London, whose walls are covered with what is generally believed to be the first computer program — a lovely, concise piece of code, written in blood, that implements an ingenious algorithm she called Dead Gentleman Sort. a tight little O(log n) affair developed in a language of her own devising. Her genius died with her, alas, on a gallows in the center of London. Her last words — “Fuck yer fucking friend functions! ‘Tis a blatant violation of the principle of encapsulation, ye addled halfwits!” — befuddled all present, and put many out of sorts. But all regained their good cheer when she managed to gnaw off her executioner’s ear, just before the trap door opened beneath her feet, and whisked her away from a world unprepared for all she had to offer it.
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