Entry #5: Mother of Compilers

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In this entry, I will talk about Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, also known as “Amazing Grace”. If you have read previous entries from this blog, you may have noticed that I read one article, listen to a podcast or watch a video; but, for this entry, I will talk about the 2013 article titled “Grace Hopper – The Mother of Cobol” from the “I Programmer” web site and also about the 16 minutes long video documentary “The Queen Of Code”, directed by Gillian Jacobs in 2015.

Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) was a computer scientist and Navy Rear-Admiral of the United States of America. She is considered the Queen of Code, as the people will remember her as the creator of the COBOL programming language, one of the first compiled computer languages which opened up the field of programming to people who didn’t have a high-level math degrees. Moreover, she was the first person to bring the idea of a compiler to make programs easier and more readable.

She is also remembered because of her inventions: The construction of the Harvard Mark I, the first electro-mechanical computer in America, the UNIVAC competitions and the BINAC's programming, which was a binary machine build for the Snark Missile project.

For her ideals, she is a potential icon for the feminist movement as she gave the example of equal opportunities with men, but not only that, she was pioneer in a field that opened so many possibilities for girls and for software. development.

She believed that programming languages should be easily understood as English; this belief was highly influential on the development of the COBOL programming language. We, the programmers, are in debt with Grace Hopper’s influence, because of her, we can use conditionals (if/else) instead of 1s and 0s in our codes.

Article: Historian. (2013). Grace Hopper - The Mother of Cobol. Recovered from https://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/294-the-mother-of-cobol.html

Documentary: Jacobs, G. (2015). The Queen Of Code. Recovered from https://vimeo.com/118556349

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