Who is Grace Hopper？ Meet the Queen of Code

Throughout history, there have been a lot of queens. Queens of countries, queens of music, but there is only one queen of code, and that is Grace Hopper. Hopper invented the first compiler, pioneered programming languages, and she was one of the first programmers of one of the earliest digital computers. Oh, and she was a U.S. Navy rear admiral. Probably the most dangerous phrase you can ever use in a computer environment is that dreadful one, but we've always done it that way. Hopper was born in New York City in 1906. As a child, she was known to take things apart to see how they worked. She had the support of her parents, her father especially, who even way back then understood the importance that his daughters had the same education that his son was going to She went on to graduate from Vassar with a degree in math and physics. Then she went to Yale and earned a PhD in math, which was a rare achievement at the time. After graduation, Hopper began a career as a college mathematics teacher. Going against the mold, she pushed her students to not just perform calculations, but to explain math using words. The tendency of translating mathematical equations into ordinary English would accompany her for the rest of her life. After teaching maths for nearly a decade, Grace was ready for something more. She took time off work to study with the noted mathematician Richard Courant. Shortly after, the Second Great War began. And we were the leading example of that free world that Hitler was committed to breaking asunder. At the age of 36, she quit her teaching position, divorced her husband, and joined the naval army. With the war in full swing, the military commandeered a lot of technology to crack enemy communications or help the war efforts. Among those was the Harvard Mark I, which Hopper was assigned to work with. Mark I was all 51 feet long, eight feet high, eight feet deep, had all of 72 words in it, could do three additions every second. Seems pitiful today, because there are about five, six, ten Mark Is on one chip. Till the 1950s, there were only maybe half a dozen electronic computers in the world. The point is for all you young people is that until about 40 years ago, nobody would have known much about computers. She had to translate real world problems into mathematical equations, and then translate those equations into commands the computer could understand. How did you know so much about computers then? I didn't. How did you? The first one. Yeah. Also working on the Harvard Mark I was Howard Aiken, who was the mastermind behind the computer. However, he wasn't a fan of having a woman among his officers. Still, at one point, he gave Hopper the task of documenting how to work with the Harvard Mark I. She took her task very seriously, writing a 500-page tome, which can be seen as the world's first computer programming manual. After that, Aiken soon made Hopper his primary programmer and top deputy. Oh, and fun fact, during this time, Hopper coined and popularized the use of the term debugging in relation to computing. Mark II stopped. We finally located the failing relay. It was one of the big signal relays. And inside the relay, beaten to death by the relay contacts, was a moth about this big. So the operator got a pair of tweezers and very carefully fished the moth out of the relay, put it in the logbook, put scotch tape over it, and below it, he wrote, first actual bug found. In 1949, Hopper again changed her career. She entered the corporate world, joining the team developing the UNIVAC I. Sweet. Which would become yet another historically important computer. Around this time, she started working on what is considered the world's first compiler. A compiler is used to translate high-level programming languages into binary language that can be understood by a computer. Programs were being created numerically with ones and zeros, the operation codes. And she said, this is not how we think as human beings. We need to be able to tell computers what to do with our words. Hopper succeeded with this new concept in 1952. But according to her, people were so skeptical that they wouldn't even touch it at first. Over these years, I've had a lot to do with computers. I've driven a large number of people, at least partially nuts. After all, insisting on talking to computers in plain English was a totally ridiculous idea, and you couldn't do that. Except it worked. On top of the compiler, Hopper and her team released some of the first compiler-based programming languages, including Flomatic. Flomatic would be pivotal in the creation of COBOL, the popular language for data processors. You're known as the queen of software. Is that right? Grace was unapologetic. She was fierce, and she was brilliant. Everybody regards her as the first programmer in the modern sense, and also the first woman in the United States, certainly, who was really significant in the history of computing. She saw, even then, that someday that everyone will be able to use computers. Everyone will be able to interact with them, and she believed that everyone should be able to program them. Hopper continued her work with while steadily growing in rank in the Navy until she became rear admiral. After she retired, she kept on teaching and giving lectures until her death in 1992, and despite her many technical accomplishments in life, she said that her greatest joy came from teaching.