Mother of Compilers

This week lecture/video was "Grace Hooper - The mother of COBOL" and "The Queen of code" respectively. The lecture talks about Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper who was responsible for the development of the Cobol language and for making computing more accessible.

It is generally acknowledged that the first programmer was female - Ada Countess of Lovelace but Ada was just the first in a long line of dedicated women programmers.

Perhaps the most famous, important and colorful of this army, or should it be navy, of female software experts is without doubt Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper. She was responsible not only for the development of the Cobol language but for the continuous pressure within the industry to make computers and computing more accessible.

Her time with Aiken served as her basic training in computing. She learned to program. She learned the value of subroutines and co-operation, she was exposed to the writings of Babbage and she invented the term Bug.

Before that machine was available she programmed the BINAC - a small binary machine built in secret for the Snark Missile project. This used an octal representation for its Op codes and Hopper quickly learned to think in octal - even to the extent of mistakenly adding up her bank balance in octal!

At first she thought about ways of making machines easier to use by creating higher level languages. 

In 1952 Hopper and her team at Remington wrote the A-0 compiler, almost just to show that it could be done. To make it all work they had to invent many of the fundamental techniques of translation.

The tide slowly turned in her favour and at last she was given the chance to put together a compiler for a large language - the B-0 compiler which then became Flow-matic in 1957. The language was targeted at business use and Hopper even felt that arithmetic expressions were too complicated for the average user and introduced a very wordy language.

If you are interested in reading the article here's the link: The Mother of COBOL.

If you are interested in watching the video here's the link: The Queen of Code.