Biography
Grace Hopper
- Born
- 9 December 1906
- Died
- 1 January 1992
- Nationality
- American
- Known for
- The first compiler, Work that led to COBOL
Grace Hopper did more than almost anyone to make programming something a person could read. Before her work, instructing a computer meant writing in the raw numeric codes the machine understood. Hopper thought that was backwards, and she spent her career proving that computers could meet people closer to their own language.
A mathematics professor who joined the US Navy during the Second World War, she was assigned to the Harvard Mark I, one of the first large computers, and never left the field. In 1952 she built the A-0 system, generally credited as the first compiler, a program that translated symbolic instructions into machine code. The idea was doubted at first. Many believed computers could only ever do arithmetic. She showed otherwise.
That work led directly to COBOL, a language written in something close to English that ran business and government systems for decades and still runs some today. Hopper stayed in the Navy for most of her life, retiring as a rear admiral, and became one of the most recognisable figures in computing.
Frequently asked
What did Grace Hopper invent?
She built the first compiler, a program that translates human-readable instructions into machine code, and she drove the idea that programs could be written in something close to English, which led to the COBOL language.
Did Grace Hopper coin the term bug?
Not exactly. The word bug for a fault predates her, but her team famously taped a real moth found in a computer into a logbook in 1947, and the story helped popularise bug and debugging in computing.
What was the first compiler?
Hopper's A-0 system, written in 1952, is generally credited as the first compiler. It let programmers write symbolic code that the machine then translated into instructions it could run.