today we’re looking at yet another woman who completely revolutionized computer science—grace hopper! hopper begun her career in mathematics, earning a phd at yale and becoming a professor at vassar college. after the outbreak of world war ii, hopper joined the us navy reserves as part of the waves program. she was sent to harvard to work on mark 1, one of the first electromechanical computers to be used in a war effort.

 

in 1949, hopper joined the team developing the univac i, the first large-scale electronic computer on the market. while working on the univac i, hopper had the revolutionary idea of creating a programming language consisting entirely of english words. she figured that since it would be easier for humans to program in english words, machines ought to do the translation for them. her idea was very quickly shot down, as most people didn’t think a computer would be able to understand english. nevertheless, she persisted in her work. despite being simultaneously hard at work on the univac i, in 1952 she created the worlds first operational compiler. in 1954, hopper and her team released some of the first compiler-based programming languages, including the english-like flow-matic.

 

in 1959, flow-matic was extended into cobol, a language that became the backbone for all future computer programming languages. hopper continued her patriotic work until the very end, she continued to serve in the navy, and helped build a standardized version of cobol for the navy. upon her retirement, she was awarded the defense distinguished service medal, the highest non-combat decoration awarded by the department of defense. her work has formed the foundation for the future of computer science.

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bonus fun fact: the convention of referring to problems with code as “bugs” and the process of removing them as “debugging” is attributed to hopper! while working at harvard, her team found that the computer wasn’t working because a moth was trapped in the hardware. they fixed the computer by removing the moth, so hopper noted that they were “debugging” the system.

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"Manipulating symbols was fine for mathematicians but it was no good for data processors who were not symbol manipulators. Very few people are really symbol manipulators. If they are they become professional mathematicians, not data processors."

-Grace Hopper

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(written 3/13/21)