In this entry I'll be going over the story of the "Queen of Code", Grace Hopper, another great example of a woman fighting hard to stand out in a male-dominant industry.
So, the start of her story reminds me a lot of the previous women we've seen, not only in the Architecture course but also last semester in the Programming languages course. Grace starts off as a young girl with an interest for engineering. At least that's how I saw it if your passion is to disassemble 7 clocks just to see how they work. The article suggests how, if she were a boy instead, parents would be quick to nurture her learning impulses. I can certainly empathize with the struggle. As a kid, back in 06-07, I really wanted to code websites and video games. Despite my interests (and being a male) my parents had no idea of how to help me. Anyways, small tangent.
Pretty soon, her skills were on full display when she enlisted in the Navy to begin working with primitive computers. Really slow dinosaurs, 3 additions per second type-deal. On one occasion, a literal bug, as in, an insect (moth), produced a physical error interfering with the proper functionality of the program.
Now, something that's quite admirable is the amazing foresight and formidable vision that Hopper had when she came up with the idea of a compiler. It's almost like these articles for the course are part of an anthology series with a compiler theme. Even though Hopper spoke, wrote, thought and probably dreamed math (and octal), she wanted to simplify the way things were programmed. She is rightfully known as the Mother of COBOL, thanks to her efforts to transform language that was very conventional into language that read like a simple spoken instruction, as well as largely influencing in the details of the COBOL language.
So, the start of her story reminds me a lot of the previous women we've seen, not only in the Architecture course but also last semester in the Programming languages course. Grace starts off as a young girl with an interest for engineering. At least that's how I saw it if your passion is to disassemble 7 clocks just to see how they work. The article suggests how, if she were a boy instead, parents would be quick to nurture her learning impulses. I can certainly empathize with the struggle. As a kid, back in 06-07, I really wanted to code websites and video games. Despite my interests (and being a male) my parents had no idea of how to help me. Anyways, small tangent.
Pretty soon, her skills were on full display when she enlisted in the Navy to begin working with primitive computers. Really slow dinosaurs, 3 additions per second type-deal. On one occasion, a literal bug, as in, an insect (moth), produced a physical error interfering with the proper functionality of the program.
Now, something that's quite admirable is the amazing foresight and formidable vision that Hopper had when she came up with the idea of a compiler. It's almost like these articles for the course are part of an anthology series with a compiler theme. Even though Hopper spoke, wrote, thought and probably dreamed math (and octal), she wanted to simplify the way things were programmed. She is rightfully known as the Mother of COBOL, thanks to her efforts to transform language that was very conventional into language that read like a simple spoken instruction, as well as largely influencing in the details of the COBOL language.
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