Grace Hopper (person)
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- The first compiler, the work behind COBOL
- Nationality
- American
The rear admiral who pushed through the idea that programs could be written in something resembling English — and built the compiler that proved it.
Hopper worked during the war on the Harvard Mark I and in 1952 wrote A-0, the first system to translate symbolic code into machine code. The reception was cool; the prevailing view was that computers could only do arithmetic. Her FLOW-MATIC language then became the basis for COBOL, which made business programming readable and which still runs a large share of the world's banking systems.
She popularised the word bug after a colleague taped a moth, found in a relay of the Mark II in 1947, into the logbook with the note "first actual case of bug being found". She left the Navy as a rear admiral at the age of 79. The slug grace-hopper in this wiki is Nvidia's superchip, named after her.