2-2: Mother of Compilers

When we talk about women in the software industry our mind goes directly to Ada Lovelace but there is other (and in my opinion more important) woman that also it is necessary to know. I am talking about Grace Murray Hopper.

Grace Murray Hopper was an extraordinary woman that established the bases of the Cobol Language and the first woman that not only though that computers were more than monsters of calculus. Influenced by the ideas and philosophy of Babbage she developed the very first compiler, the A-0 compiler. At first this compiler was underestimated by the community in order to change this point of view, Hopper tell the community to come and try the compiler with any problem that they had. One of the problems that the compiler solved was one on derivates, the machine accomplished the correct calculation of the first 15 derivates of a problem that a person was having of a very ugly function. Another thing that this compiler could accomplish, was the translation of French and German Code into Machine Code.

This is why, Hopper did not like the name of a calculator machine, she always believed that the computer was a manipulator of symbols. But how Hopper achieved the difficult task of creating a compiler well she found that it was very useful the forward pass strategy, that she learned during that days when she played women's basketball. Another quest she had to pass was to establish the bases of the fundamental techniques of translation.

Another important and cultural thing we need to mention is that thanks to Hopper the term "bug" exists. She told us the story of how this term was created. The Mark 1 computer was acting up and giving incorrect results. In order to solve this malfunction, they performed an internal examination. The product of the examination was the founding of a real bug jammed between the contacts.  This error was documented in the logbook of the machine.