Mother of Compilers


Hi, today’s entry is going to be a little different. In my other entries and blogs, we were always talking about one article, one podcast, one documentary, etc. But today we are going to talk about two, an article and a mini-documentary. I’m referring to the article “Grace Hopper – The Mother of Cobol” by Historian, and the documentary “The Queen of Code” directed by Gillian Jacobs in 2015. Obviously, they talk about the same topic, in resume Grace Hopper as a programmer. 
The first one, the article, talks specifically about Grace Hopper as not only the responsible for the Cobol language development, but also for the constant pressure exerted to the industry for computers development and make them in an accessible way. One of her reasons for this was to bring the research and career woman’s interests in computing to the forefront, why? Because she suffered the disadvantages of being a woman with interest in technology and despite that, she became the most famous and important software experts of the navy. One thing that I didn’t know is that Grace Hopper was the first person using the term bug, one of the most software development terms or concepts used nowadays.
The second one, the mini-documentary, talk about exactly the same. It’s like both the article and the documentary work together in order to demonstrate that effectively Grace Hopper is the Queen of code. A specific part I liked about the mini-documentary was the explanation of how Grace Hopper decided and built the first “human-computer code compiler”. She knew that not all persons like mathematics,  the use of symbols or aren’t good at it, so she decided to work on a way for using and converting the English language into computer language, like high-level to low-level. In this way, any person would be able to program a computer using a common language. 
I’d already heard about Grace Hopper, but I wasn’t aware of all the things she did and their importance and impact in nowadays life and software development. Maybe without her contributions, my career would be totally different from how it actually is. I really admire her work, so I consider myself a Grace Hopper fan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Hi, today’s entry is going to talk about this course book called “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” published in 1979 by Douglass Adams. This book is literally a journey through space. The main character Arthur Dent escaped from the Earth with Ford Prefect (the actual writer for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) because it was going to be destroyed. Arthur and Ford escaped on a Vogon ship (the ones who destroyed the Earth), but they were blasted into space and caught by another ship piloted by Zaphod Beeblebox, the king of the universe. That ship was both stolen and special because it has the “improbability drive” that literally functions as it sounds, with improbability. Thanks to that ship ability they arrived at a legend planet called Magrathea, where they found all the truth. That planet was the home of a computer built to find the answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Guess what? The answer is 42 and the Earth was another super-computer built t...
Read more

Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern

Hi, today's entry is going to talk about an article written by our professor Ariel Ortiz. The article/paper is titled “Language Design and Implementation using Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern “. After reading this paper, I realized some things. First of all, I got really impressed that this paper explains a framework used to teach in a course, in my actual university, that I already took. Second, in the title the Interpreter Pattern is mentioned and actually in another course (from which I also write a blog weekly) we are treating design patterns. It’s important to mention that I’m taking that course now and it is with the same professor.  Basically, The S-expression Interpreter Framework (SIF) is explained in this article as a tool for teaching language design and implementation concepts. This interpreter was written in Ruby to help us, the students, to learn a popular object-oriented dynamic language and language design and implementations concepts. But here is the curious poin...
Read more

Building Server-Side Web Language Processors

Hi, today’s blog entry is going to talk about an article called “Building Server-Side Web Language Processors and once again, the author is our Compilers Design professor Ariel Ortiz. Basically, it talks about and discusses useful insights for instructors who are considering using some kind of web approach in the courses involving language design and implementation. The purpose is to have students build a language processor that runs on the web, rather than on processor that runs on a command-line shell as normally they do. This web tool or web server was used for three different courses: Programming Languages, Language Translators and Software Development Project. I want to mention that from these subjects, I also have taken the first one, while the others are completely new to me, I’ve never heard about them and I think they aren’t imparted anymore, at least not with that name. I found interesting that incorporation of a web-based approach into those courses. Why? Because it inv...
Read more