I'm sure someone here has a better explanation for a connection I've been thinking about (and saw on twitter, for what it's worth), so I figured I'd ask here.

I've never looked that much into knitting, but the instructions seem remarkably similar to assembly language instructions. Beyond that, I did a little bit of research into a jacquard loom works the other day, and realized it operated using punch cards. This really fascinates me, because it seems to precede Babbage's machine and yet I never have read particularly much treatment of it in history of computing type treatises.

I wonder if, given some of the conventionally more feminine stereotyped gender roles pertaining to knitting and clothmaking, any of this played into what early conceptions of what a "programmer" was? Was there a point where people reasonably made the inference that the closest analog for what early punch card programming was would be jacquard loom operation and knitting? It is fascinating how it the idea of the vocation of writing software flipped the other way in terms of gender stereotypes.