First Programmer - was a lady :)

[latha]

Ada Lovelace is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, encoding an algorithm in a form to be processed by a machine—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace