American Computer Scientists Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton Receive Presidential Medals of Freedom (fedscoop.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from FedScoop: President Barack Obama awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom to two storied women in tech -- one posthumously to Grace Hopper, known as the "first lady of software," and one to programmer Margaret Hamilton. Hopper worked on the Harvard Mark I computer, and invented the first compiler. "At age 37 and a full 15 pounds below military guidelines, the gutsy and colorful Grace joined the Navy and was sent to work on one of the first computers, Harvard's Mark 1," Obama said at the ceremony Tuesday. "She saw beyond the boundaries of the possible and invented the first compiler, which allowed programs to be written in regular language and then translated for computers to understand." Hopper followed her mother into mathematics, and earned a doctoral degree from Yale, Obama said. She retired from the Navy as a rear admiral. "From cell phones to Cyber Command, we can thank Grace Hopper for opening programming up to millions more people, helping to usher in the Information Age and profoundly shaping our digital world," Obama said. Hamilton led the team that created the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo command modules and lunar modules, according to a White House release. "At this time software engineering wasn't even a field yet," Obama noted at the ceremony. "There were no textbooks to follow, so as Margaret says, 'there was no choice but to be pioneers.'" He added: "Luckily for us, Margaret never stopped pioneering. And she symbolizes that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space."

Comments

Grace Hopper's resistance

[Tablizer]

Many criticized the idea compilers at the time for "dumbing down programming", fearing loss of understanding about the guts. Thus, the idea kind of languished until organizations realized they had to rewrite all their code for different brands or later models. The idea of a machine-agnostic middle language then became financially appealing to reduce recoding.

Thus, it wasn't really the alleged human-friendly angle that made compilers marketable, but the portability of the code.

Re:Grace Hopper's resistance

[silentcoder]

Portability was a factor but not nearly on the level you describe - note how operating systems remained in machine code right until the end of the 1960s and nobody tried to write one in a compiled language until Kernighan and Ritchie. Consider also the language that Hopper created: Cobol. A language that remains universally hated by programmers, second only to BASIC in horribleness for a trained coder - yet it was incredibly successful. It was written to look like the kind of forms that business executives filled in regularly and to make it possible for them to write their own code.
That never actually happened very much -but it did get executives to start seeing the value in programming and COBOL became a major industry. To this day there are giant systems at many corporations (especially banks) that are written in COBOL and programmers who can work the language (and stomach it) get paid very high salaries (not least because so few are willing to learn it - most of us would rather earn less than have to fill in forms designed for burocrats to write an algorithm).

COBOL's problems aside - it's design does show one absolutely clear intention: user-friendliness. One could argue that trying to make programming userfriendly by analogy to burocracy was a wrong way to approach it, but you can't argue that, that was the intention. Hopper was clearly trying for userfriendliness and in that regard was way ahead of her time.
She was also involved in numerous other groundbreaking things. My critique of COBOL should in no way be read as disparaging to it's creator - on the contrary, it was a major breakthrough and while COBOL itself was a terrible language the concept of a compiler that could turn a human-readable text into code would change computing forever. Portability was just one of the many advantages that came out of it. Hopper definitely belongs in the same class as Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing as one of the principle drivers of the computing revolution.