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Google Doodle Remembers Computing Pioneer Grace Hopper
SternisheFan writes "Monday's Google Doodle honors computing genius Grace Hopper (remembered as a great pioneer in computing, as well as in women's achievements in science and engineering), on what would have been her 107th birthday, doodling her right where she spent much of her time – at the helm of one of the world's first computers."
I always liked seeing the sign for Grace Hopper Park in Arlington, VA, in front of the apartment complex where she lived for years. Sadly, they did not put "Admiral" on the sign.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
Anybody on Slashdot who doesn't know who she is ... get the fuck out, because you're on the wrong website.
is much of the modern computing world.
Without her Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. would not be where they are today.
* this is in no way to diminish the other pioneers in the field - Touring, von Newman, von Lovelace, etc...
I think we can blame all the faults of COBOL on the fact that she wanted it to be human readable by business managers. What would your programming language look like if the Pointy-Haired Boss had to be able to understand it?
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
she's definitely historically significant but as someone who had the misfortune of running MVS/CICS/VSAM applications for several years I have a hard time celebrating anything associated with COBOL...
If you don't know who she is, educate yourself
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You know why there aren't a lot of women in IT now, right? It's because after Grace Hopper unleashed COBOL, we're been leery about letting them in.
(It's a joke! Claim down.)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Before the late 1940s the word "computer" refered to clerks who computed mathematical tables (e.g. weapon trajectories) by hand or mechanical calculator. All these clerks were female and their bosses males. So when the first anlog and digital computers came along in the late 1940s, some of their clerks became their programmers. Programming was by rewiring switchboards or punch tape in those days. The electrical engineers and mathmaticians who built the hardware were mostly male. Soem of them migrated into software too.
Exactly my thoughts as well.
Idiot white men.
Really? I never see the Google "home page" anymore, I just type something into the address bar, if it's not a URL then it sends it as a search to Google and gives me the results
Yes, the Google logo on the left is a bit different than usual but not enough to tell me what it was about.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The doodle is a topic of interest? You've got to be kidding me.
One of my favorite quotes is from her: "It is far easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.
Bing is doing the same thing but no mention of them.
I guess that's what you get when there's nothing here but a bunch of Fandroids.
A much more interesting article is about how Google wants to ban civilians (ie Amazon) from building a drone delivery system. So Google is going to bend the ear of the legislature to try to get an unfair edge against a competitor. Why isn't that being reported on? Why not headlines about the evil inherent in Google?
Well, see, the first woman to publish in mathematics was stripped naked and dragged to death behind a wagon, and it's been an uphill swim ever since...
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2516
My version of Chrome now shows the doodle on the "New Tab" page. I'm glad. I always hated missing them.
I got to MEET her. I was a faculty brat at Syracuse where she was a graduation speaker, and through a lot of begging, my dad got me a seat at the speakers table, and she held forth, drinking straight scotch, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls and swearing for two hours. One of the best moments in my life. I'll never forget it, and she's been an inspiration through my career.
And I have a nanosecond.
Hypatia?
every year - SSDD ad infinitum
I attended a talk she gave in the early 80's. She was quite an entertaining speaker. She was able to describe some concepts in an easy way to undersand way. Like how long is a millisecond or a nanosecond? She handed out nanoseconds at the end. I still have that little 11.8 inch piece of wire.
I have fond memories of her. On the one occasion I got to see her in person, I was a member of a student ACM chapter, and she was our guest speaker. I remember that she had very strong opinions, particularly about IBM.
At the time, the System 360 was all the rage, and had blue cabinets. She brought an 8080 to the presentation in a small, blue plastic case, commenting that she'd heard computers came in blue boxes. She also commented (again about the 360) that it couldn't be much of a machine, since it spent half of its time talking to itself, a reference to the operating system overhead.
I've often wondered what she'd think of computers and operating systems today, particularly Windows and Linux.
R.I.P. Grace Hopper. You're a hard lady to forget!
Yes.
I had the honor of hearing her speak as a guest lecturer when I attended Ohio State. I remember her showing us the nanoseconds! An original geek, an outstanding technologist, a wonderful human being. And, oh yes, a woman.
dreamWeaver
Back in the day, COBOL names were UPPERCASE and used hyphens. So, Grace would have used CURRENT-YEAR, not CurrentYear, as the Google Doodle does. :-)
Only allowed two digit ages and forgot to handle the overflow flag.
Have gnu, will travel.
"If it's good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission." --Grace Hopper
* credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches
* Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) is named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.
* at the age of seven she decided to determine how an alarm clock worked, and dismantled seven...
* bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics
* wrote her own compiler in 1952.. "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."
More here of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
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The realm of women is whatever they want it to be. There is substantial cultural inertia, especially in places like the Southeast US, that impedes young women from trying to "do computers and tech stuff", and so the lampshading of legitimate achievements made by folks like Hopper is no bad thing. Yes, were she male she wouldn't get quite as many accolades, but so? She was a pioneer, and there is no shame in pointing out to today's young women "want to become a computer scientist? You're in good company."
I have as much distaste for postmodern cultural wankery as you, but informing women that they are welcome in the scientific community ain't that.
I taught computational physics for a couple of years as a grad student. Of the students that I considered absolutely top-notch, about 60% were women (where the difference from 50% is statistical noise). As far as physics went, they were basically the same as the men.
When I was at MIT in the 1970s there was not an official computer science major yet, even though were several prominant computer science labs that every student wanted to play in. Compuer science was a minor in EE, ME, and business. In 1980 MIT recognized a formal CS degree.
I wondered if the procrastination was due to the "taint" of programming being a trade-school craft and not a real scientific discipline. And that in turn due to its early female participation.
my experience has been that PHB's struggle far more with LOGIC (do it this way unless it's the 2nd Tuesday of the month & a full moon business rules) than code itself...
It'd have a lot more pictures in it.
Say, isn't it drag/drop/drool/click programming's turn at the top of the hype heap again?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I still remember her on Letterman and her giving him one of her nanoseconds :)
I completely agree, except the part where you said she wouldn't get quite as many accolades. She wrote the first compiler. That's fucking seminal! Who else can claim a first that big?
The COBOL program should be subtracting 06 from 13 giving 7!
The first version of this Doodle got the algorithm to compute age wrong (!). The original version of the Doodle used the COBOL expression
SUBTRACT CurrentYear FROM BirthYear GIVING Age
which actually computes the negative of the age (for most people born after Christ, anyway).
I wondered whether this might be a nod to her pioneering work in software debugging, as also referenced in the flying moth at the end of the animation, but since Google has since corrected the bug, it seems even the mighty Google still sometimes commits the simplest of programming errors. (Right on their main page and logo, too. Oooops. I suppose there's also the view that the code was wrong because it was a woman doing the coding. You misogynist Google bastards.)
Whatever the reason, happy birthday and many thanks to Amazing Grace.
(full disclosure: I submitted this as a story overnight, but since it didn't get picked up, it seemed too funny to let it completely slip into the ether.)
There's nothing wrong with not knowing something important; the sin is not lifting a finger to find the fact out -- e.g. people seemingly incapable of typing a name into wikipedia and reading the first paragraph (and then whining about it in the comments instead in hopes someone will spoon-feed it to them). Those are the people who need to get lost.
Chips Ahoy: Do you think the current popularity of micros is just a fad?
Hopper: No, the big mainframes are going to disappear. In fact, I intend to scuttle them. They have to go. They’ll be too slow. We’ll build systems of computers. It will be a whole bunch of micros, and they’ll all call each other up and talk. If you use a big mainframe, first you have to do inventory and then you do payroll and so on. You might just as well have a micro doing each of those jobs all working in parallel. That’s the way you get the speed. The big pressure is going to be on faster answers. There never was a good reason for putting inventory and payroll on the same machine. The only reason you did it was because you could only afford to own one computer. That’s no longer true. The micros are as big [in terms of processing capacity] as mainframes were only 10 or 12 years ago. Back then a big mainframe had 64K. That’s smaller than today’s micros by a long shot.
Chips Ahoy: Is there a limit of what micros can do for us?
Hopper: They’ll only be limited if our imaginations are limited. It’s all up to us. Remember, there were people who said the airplane couldn’t fly.
http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm#limits
Display output would be -107
I think we can blame all the faults of COBOL on the fact that she wanted it to be human readable by business managers. What would your programming language look like if the Pointy-Haired Boss had to be able to understand it?
How many programmers of that era were expert in modern corporate accounting, law, banking, business practices and procedures, as they had evolved over the past three or four centuries --- and not merely knowledgeable, but credentialed, as a C.P.A., for example?
In turn, how many accountants could have read and validated FORTRAN code for accounts receivable?
You may scoff at COBOL, but she pioneered the idea of using a more human-friendly notation instead of machine language and its cousin, assembler. Her experiments were the precursor to Algol, which shaped all the imperative block-oriented languages we use today, including C, Java, VB, Pascal, etc.
And it made software more vendor-independent as the languages were not tied to a specific machine architecture, unlike machine code and assembler.
Before that, many scoffed at the idea of "dumbing down" programming with English-like syntax, fearing it would waste resources and invite poorly educated riff-raff into the field. (Well, maybe it did :-)
Perhaps Grace didn't get it quite right on the first try, but she helped spark a computer language revolution that led to better tools down the road. She tested waters others feared.
Table-ized A.I.
If I'd invented COBOL during the course of my career, I'd have blamed it on a subcontractor.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Did you submit this to reddit?
https://pay.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1sg049/the_single_line_of_cobol_code_in_todays_google/
Look at the top-rated comment.
1. The primitive systems it ran on (and ran well on, all things considered)
2. The early COBOL programmers came to it often w/o experience in other languages (so it worked well enough for beginners and pros)
3. There are still MANY systems in our economy still running COBOL code for very important tasks (it's held up amazingly well... better than most languages)
I wrote my share of COBOL code many years ago (wrote lots of FORTRAN too) now it's C,C++,C#, or assembler for me (depending on target and project) but I still maintain a healthy respect for both COBOL and FORTRAN and their developers. Most younger programmers have never experienced punch cards, Teletype terminals, etc and therefore do not fully comprehend either the environment in which these languages arose or the leap forward that they provided... that's not an insult - most car drivers have no experience with buggy whips - but younger users of any tech often cannot grasp the full impact of inventions that pre-date them.
Nope, stopped reading reddit long ago after discovering the mods' penchant for silently censoring comments and entire story threads they didn't like.
That the original Doodle might have accurately depicted poor-but-industry-accepted COBOL coding practices (i.e., approving and committing code where the program logic is wrong but the result of the calculation may still appear correct if an invisible dependency on a separate section of the program happens to work out in the programmer's favor) is either deeply nuanced, deeply disturbing, or both. ;-)
(Showing enough COBOL to correctly calculate age-in-years would make for a verrrry long Doodle.)
It was an honest mistake (as almighty as it may seem, Google is run by people, and those people sometimes commit the simplest of programming errors indeed!). The doodle guys also considered keeping the code and changing the output to -107 as a reference to debugging (and the moth), but figured that most people wouldn't get the moth reference.
My favorite COBOL line ever,
PERFORM LOBOTOMY 3 TIMES.
LOBOTOMY rang the bell on the printer without printing anything, we placed the above line at the end of long running procedures to alert the operator.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>