Historical Figure in Computer Programming

Grace Hopper

This particular post was a bit more difficult than the others. In the development of computers, it has always been uneven. This is due to the fact that the creation of the computer can not be tied to a single name. The computer has had multiple pioneers. It is for that reason that I chose something a little more specific in this particular field of computers. I had done a little digging on pioneers towards computer programming, since I'm learning a programming language. Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist, whom I consider a pioneer in the field. Grace ended her career in the Navy with the rank of admiral, but she is best remembered for her work in computer programming. Grace was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language which is huge. Her creation allowed programmers to use near English instead of binary code(machine code..1001001). She also pioneered the concept of a library of subroutines that different programs coule call upon(in python we'd call these functions), rather than coding the same thing again and again with each program. After Grace's contribution to computer programming, programming became a story of higher level languages that allowed computer programmer s to focus more on creating new applications than on learning and composing in machine code. Grace is also noted as the person who coined the term 'debugging' when it came to fixing their computer after a technician found a dead moth in the relay of the Harvd Mark II electromechanical computer in 1947. It has been noted that Grace was did not coin the term debugging and that Thomas Edison did first.











http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/hopper.html
http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-history/did-you-know-edison-coined-the-term-bug
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers-h/g-hoppr7.htm