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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 knew somebody would bring that up. In defense of COBOL, 1. Look when it was invented. 2. Look how much staying power it has. 3. Look at the train wrecks caused by later efforts to make easier, more readable programming languages.
COBOL looks pretty good when you consider all that.
Anybody on Slashdot who doesn't know who she is ... get the fuck out, because you're on the wrong website.
You might try wrapping your head around this: obligatory XKCD.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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?
Thank you for that.
You see, Ms. Hopper, being ahead of her time in MANY respects, knew that programming should be easily done in a human readable fashion.
Programming computers should be easy. Having difficult to learn languages defeats the purpose of these machines. Being able to program these things should be easy to everyone and the fact that it STILL isn't shows the ineptitude of the computer science world - or arrogance (dude, computers SHOULD be hard to program because it's for smart people or some such nonsense).
Computers are a tool, The fact that computer languages haven't evolved much since the 1960s is pretty sad.
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Please oh please post a flame that languages have evolved so that I can spank you hardily - 50 years and we're still typing esoteric computer code?! Seriously?
If you think that is the way it is, then YOU have NO imagination.
I suspect Jobs *would* be where he is today, since she wasn't researching cures for pancreatic cancer.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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