Amazing Grace

[ironymaiden]

today is Grace Hopper's birthday.

wrote the manual for the Mark I? Grace Hopper.
first compiler? Grace Hopper.
COBOL spec? Grace Hopper.


i'm sorry to say that i was not aware of her before today.

Comments

[mrdorbin.livejournal.com]

I'm always (sort of) surprised she's less famous than she ought to be. Turing machines are great and all but the compiler brought computing into the realm of practicality. If it weren't for Grace Hopper I'd probably be a physics grad student who spent half his time consulting a huge book of machine instructions right now.

[e-bourne.livejournal.com]

Thanks for bringing her to my attention. She was amazing. I love learning about the invisible women who, like her, did things that really changed how we do stuff and then were forgotten.

[ironymaiden]

i think it's because laypeople don't know that compilers are used at all. if your exposure to coding is BASIC and HTML, then the need for a compiler is a mystery.

i was bummed that the fact that she wrote the manual for the Mark I isn't mentioned very often in the articles about her.

[buhrger]

also responsible for promulgating the term "bug". allegedly also balanced her checkbook in octal.

you're aware of ada lovelace, though, right? first progammer evar.

[ironymaiden]

i typed and redacted the bug thing because it's all kind of furry. (she helped trace the fault. someone else found the actual moth and taped it in the log book. she told the story a lot and popularized the use of "debug" although bug/debug was being used by Thomas Edison back in the day blah blah blah)

[ironymaiden]

oh, and yes on the Lovelace.