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.

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