Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral who helped develop the A 0 System, among the first compilers, and whose FLOW MATIC programming language directly influenced COBOL, the business programming language that grew out of a committee she strongly advocated for and shaped. She was an early and vocal proponent of writing programs in English like language rather than machine code, on the then contested belief that programs should be understandable and portable across different computers.
Facts
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Associated With
Her team wrote the A-0 compiler in May 1952 and coined the term compiler.
Source Wikipedia: Compiler
Source Wikipedia: Harvard Mark I
In Field
Source The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital RevolutionWalter Isaacson
Influenced
COBOL was designed by a CODASYL committee, not by Hopper alone, but its design drew heavily on her earlier FLOW MATIC language and she was an influential advocate throughout its development.
Source The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital RevolutionWalter Isaacson
Invented
Grace Hopper's A-0 System (1952), which translated symbolic mathematical code into machine code, is widely credited as one of the first compilers; she went on to lead work on the COBOL compiler.
Source The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital RevolutionWalter Isaacson
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster, 2014
2. Wikipedia: Grace Hopper
Wikimedia FoundationEarly life and education
She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages.
Lead section, opening sentence
Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906, January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.
View the Source Wikipedia: Compiler
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Compiler, History sectionQuote, Associated With: Compiler, History section
May 1952: Grace Hopper's team at Remington Rand wrote the compiler for the A-0 programming language (and coined the term compiler to describe it).
Wikipedia: Harvard Mark I
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Harvard Mark I, Legacy sectionQuote, Associated With: Harvard Mark I, Legacy section
the first programmers of the Mark I
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