The Queen Of Code

January 30, 2015 11:32 AM

The Queen Of Code.

You probably don’t know the name Grace Hopper, but you should.

As a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, Hopper worked on the first computer, the Harvard Mark 1. And she headed the team that created the first compiler, which led to the creation of COBOL, a programming language that by the year 2000 accounted for 70 percent of all actively used code. Passing away in 1992, she left behind an inimitable legacy as a brilliant programmer and pioneering woman in male-dominated fields.

posted by chunking express (29 comments total)

Although COBOL is often times looked upon with derision by modern programmers (and maybe rightly so), it's important to note that up until COBOL was invented, the idea of a programming interface that was designed to be even remotely human-readable was considered an alien concept. Every modern programming language owes to the legacy of COBOL.
posted by surazal at 11:37 AM on January 30, 2015 [8 favorites]

I loved that Grace Hopper visualized time units in terms of how far electrons would travel in that time.

Later than this talk, she would talk about picoseconds in terms of grains of pepper. Supposedly, the first time she did this was at DEC. The deccies were so happy about this that they had custom pepper packets printed that were labeled picoseconds.
posted by plinth at 11:44 AM on January 30, 2015 [12 favorites]

Later than this talk, she would talk about picoseconds in terms of grains of pepper

On Letterman, no less.
posted by weston at 11:57 AM on January 30, 2015 [9 favorites]

You probably have no idea what names I know or don't know.
posted by Obscure Reference at 12:24 PM on January 30, 2015 [16 favorites]

In addition to the attempt at readability, COBOL also gave us compound data structures.
posted by enf at 12:31 PM on January 30, 2015

Obscure Reference, that's a direct quote from the article. It wasn't immediately clear that it was blockquoted, but playing the numbers it is likely that a reader of fivethirtyeight.com doesn't know who Grace Hopper is.

Metafilter probably skews more Hopper-ific.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:35 PM on January 30, 2015

"Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems." - The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:38 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Letterman: "How did you know so much about computers then?"
Hopper: "I didn't. It was the first one"

Wonderful stuff
posted by greenhornet at 12:49 PM on January 30, 2015 [9 favorites]

I was responding to the quote in the article. I've met Grace Hopper. Somewhere, I've got a nanosecond.
posted by Obscure Reference at 12:51 PM on January 30, 2015 [8 favorites]

Heads up - Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2015 is now accepting proposals.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 12:52 PM on January 30, 2015

I'm familiar with Grace, but hadn't seen that Letterman appearance. She's wonderful on it (a good sense of humor and timing as well).
posted by el io at 12:55 PM on January 30, 2015

I love dudes who get all upset about women in their CS, as if every tool they use didn't owe its existence to Grace Hopper. She was awesome and everybody who benefits from IT owes her a huge debt.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:01 PM on January 30, 2015 [8 favorites]

Even this video underestimates her accomplishments. What these early coders did was like the "story of mel" but accomplished with far less prior experience or knowledge of how a computing system could be manipulated to achieve a specific goal. They really invented hacking, at its most fundamental level.

I also really like the little story about her skull and crossbones flag and how when she needed some hardware (which in those days before software was code) she would "pirate" it. How absolutely, utterly, perfect.

JJ Abrams should stop working on whatever boring reboot he's leading and immediately make a superhero movie about them.
posted by Poldo at 1:15 PM on January 30, 2015 [10 favorites]

JJ Abrams should stop working on whatever boring reboot he's leading

I swear I actually heard the record scratch sound made by a thousand MeFites nodding along in total agreement until this line.

Seriously, though, I'd *love* to see a Hopper movie.
posted by glhaynes at 1:27 PM on January 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

In terms of easy-to-read languages, Fortran predated COBOL by a couple of years. Grace Hopper, on the other hand, created FLOW-MATIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC) which predated Fortran by a couple of years. You can find more info here: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html
posted by enamon at 1:38 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I want one of those backwards clocks.
posted by oceanjesse at 1:58 PM on January 30, 2015

I used to work at a Navy supercomputer center, located on Grace Hopper Avenue. I even did some Fortran while working there.
posted by skintension at 1:59 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

JJ Abrams should stop working

Well, we agree on that.
posted by squinty at 2:27 PM on January 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

plinth: I loved that Grace Hopper visualized time units in terms of how far electrons would travel in that time.

The professor of my first EE class randomly met her at the airport, and asked to see her nanosecond, which she of course had with her.

Very cool lady.
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 2:29 PM on January 30, 2015

From what I can see, COBOL's main enduring influence (outside of the legacy systems that still run on it) would be in the syntax of SQL.
posted by acb at 3:21 PM on January 30, 2015

In the 80s, I worked for a government agency that was the lead on the first big PC contract that really fueled the widespread adoption of PC technology throughout the government. We hosted an annual conference which featured Grace Hopper as the keynote speaker one year. She spent the afternoon before the conference touring our offices and just generally being awesome and inspirational. At the time, my boss and I were working on an adhoc query engine that used SQL (then exotic) to extract data from our big mainframe database. The senior managers told us it was an enormous waste of time and forbade us to work on it any further. Grace came in and gave us a motivational talk that riffed on her famous saying that it was easier to ask forgiveness than to seek permission and she said that sometimes you know something is the right thing to do and other people don't understand it and that you have to follow your own vision. My boss and I looked at each other and realized that this was the closest thing we would get to a message from a divinity and decided that we were going to ignore the big bosses and do what we knew to be the right thing. Our feature was a huge hit and ended up being the most used aspect of the entire multi-million dollar boondoggle. I've always had the feeling that Grace Hopper was one of those people who changed a lot of things just by being herself. I've known many people who worked with her in the 70s and 80s and I've literally never heard one bad word ever spoken about her.

I've still got my nanosecond.
posted by Lame_username at 3:59 PM on January 30, 2015 [33 favorites]

Admiral Hopper has always been one of my personal heroes. From her I learned the practical approach that I use in my day-to-day work. It was probably sheer luck that she was one of the first people from the early era of computing that I learned about when I was first starting to study it as a teenager. I thank my freshman high school algebra teacher, who kept a backwards clock in the classroom, for that.

This was great. Thanks for posting it.
posted by ob1quixote at 4:20 PM on January 30, 2015

> I swear I actually heard the record scratch sound made by a thousand MeFites nodding along in total agreement until this line.

Sorry, I was just assuming Michael Bay would be too busy.
posted by Poldo at 4:32 PM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

One of the meeting rooms at my first corp job was named the Hopper room. I always us thought that was cool.
posted by clvrmnky at 1:02 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

She didn't work on the first computer. The Harvard Mark 1 was a very early computer, but not the first.
posted by Hugh Routley at 7:25 AM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

I have mixed feelings about Grace Hopper because evidently she discovered the first bug, others of which have been responsible for most of the pain and frustration in my career up until now.

Actually she didn't, but it's a funny story anyways, and Grace Hopper is truly awesome and I have no mixed feelings about her whatsoever. All of us programmers owe her a huge debt.
posted by dubitable at 7:47 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm a huge fan of Grace Hopper. She's a really excellent speaker. One of my favorite quotes from her is about how programming was "Just Like Planning a Dinner.
posted by KernalM at 9:44 AM on January 31, 2015

Re: the place of Women in the history of CS. If you know of a young person interested in maths and/or computing, particularly a young lady that you worry will be discouraged by the boyzoness of ICT I recently read and would recommend Walter Isaacson's 'The Innovators'. He is seems more than keen to highlight the debt we all owe to the women pioneers of computing. For example, he opens the book with a chapter which while being about Babbage's Analytical Engine focuses particulalry on Ada Lovelace's contribution and particularly her insights of the potential of a general purpose computing machine.

I just checked and yep, Grace Hopper gets a decent mention as well.
posted by Hello, I'm David McGahan at 8:14 PM on January 31, 2015

Fuck yeah Grace Hopper!

One could argue that Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs. Women founded computer science.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:02 PM on February 1, 2015 [3 favorites]