[sepeth]

> Note that you can be a programmer without ever having touched a computer, people have been coming up with algorithms and integrating them into systems for ages.

Slightly different, but the first episode of SICP videos helped me to reach the same conclusion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY

We can even say Newton, or Euclid wrote programs. Maybe not by sitting in front of a computer, but they described a process to calculate something.

[dalke]

"... wrote programs". I think it's better to say they wrote algorithms. A program is an algorithm instantiated for use by a machine, which might be analog or digital.

I can accept the argument that a human following an algorithm emulates a machine, but I consider it an imperfect analogy.