Grace under Pressure

[jedishrfu]

Main Question or Discussion Point

An article about Adm Grace Hopper

http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/grace-hopper

 

[hmmm27]

There's a few youtube vids of her giving generic lectures; the odd interview, in her late '70s. Very Very Sharp.

 

[jedishrfu]

And here are two, one from Letterman:


and one from 60 minutes:


Her commentary is quite classic. I like the nanosec and microsec jokes with respect to programmers.

 

[jedishrfu]

More from Wikipedia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

 

[harborsparrow]

All these snippets introducing GH fail to bring up in a timely manner the fact that she invented the most important concept in computer science: compilers. A man would def have won a Turing award for that. Just grumbling. These are great articles and snippets, otherwise.

 

[hmmm27]

A man would def have won a Turing award for that. Just grumbling.

Maybe, but then there's the 40 honorary PhD's, first American Fellow of the BCS, inaugural "Man of the Year" award from the AITP, etc. Also, the US Navy doesn't give out Admiral'ships just for good attendance, nor do huge computer firms generally headhunt people in their 70's. What's grumbly is that there's supposed to be a movie out, but it's probably been trumped out of production by "Hidden Figures" (four black women at NASA).

First time I heard her name in passing, I thought it was an in-joke: "gracing the (card reader) hopper" or summat.

 

[jedishrfu]

A longer Adm Grace Hopper on the Future of Computing:

 

[hmmm27]

Spoke too soon; I think the film is still an extant project

 

[jedishrfu]

And from Yale

https://news.yale.edu/2017/02/10/grace-murray-hopper-1906-1992-legacy-innovation-and-service

 

[sysprog]

All these snippets introducing GH fail to bring up in a timely manner the fact that she invented the most important concept in computer science: compilers. A man would def have won a Turing award for that. Just grumbling. These are great articles and snippets, otherwise.

Adm. Grace Murray Hopper has her own ACM award. The Association for Computing Machinery, which established the ACM Alan M. Turing Award in 1966, similarly honored Adm. Hopper when in 1971 they established the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.

She used the term "compiler", not as the term is used today, in reference to a program set that translates high-level language source code into program objects; she used it in reference to her linker-loader program set that produced a compilation of program objects into a conveniently manageable load set.

Later, Hopper's term "compiler" was used, at first synechdochically, for other program sets, which, while they in some instances originally included their own linker and loader components, had high-level language source-to object translation as their main function.