Grace Hopper
loreprogrammingops culture
The mathematician and US Navy rear admiral who built one of the first compilers, coined the word, and drove the English-language programming that became COBOL.
Born in 1906, she joined the Naval Reserve in 1943 and was assigned to Harvard's Mark I, then wrote the first computer manual in 1946 - the first extensive treatment anywhere of how to program a machine. At Eckert-Mauchly from 1949 she designed a compiler and named the category; her 1957 division produced Flow-Matic, the first English-language data-processing compiler, which is the direct ancestor of COBOL. The argument she had to win was not technical but cultural: that a machine could usefully translate words into instructions, and that programmers need not be mathematicians. She retired from the Navy in 1966, was recalled in 1967, and retired again in 1986 as the oldest officer on active US naval duty, aged 79.
Also known as: grace murray hopper, amazing grace