December 9th is Grace Hopper's birthday. She would've been 109 today.
I never knew her, but along with probably millions of people just like me, I owe Admiral Hopper an awful lot.
Because of her work developing Compilers, computers became very human-friendly, which greatly helped to open the floodgates for computer technology to evolve with unbelievable speed.
If I have to work in machine language, I couldn't program my way off of a flatbed truck. Grace Hopper made it possible for me to master a certain level of Application Programming that led me to some pretty great things in a very satisfying career.
One of my favorite things is the story of her presence at the birth of the term "bug" as it applies to computers.
Wikipedia:
While she was working on a Mark II Computer at a US Navy research lab in Dahlgren, Virginia in 1947, her associates discovered a moth that was stuck in a relay; the moth impeded the operation of the relay. While neither Hopper nor her crew mentioned the phrase "debugging" in their logs, the case was held as an instance of literal "debugging." For many years, the term bug had been in use in engineering.[35][36] The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.[37]
Like I said - I owe that lady a lot.
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