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

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[Calydor]

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[Darinbob]

The applying part can be hard. Remember, no handy libraries to fall back on, no frameworks, no pre-built hardware components, no idea what was possible or even plausible. After all, physics is just mathematics applied to the real world.

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[sg_oneill]

Yep. Margret Hamilton basically wrote the code that got us to the moon by literally punching binary codes into hunreds if not thousands of feet of tape with a hole puncher and sticky tape, calculating how long each assembly instruction would take and working from there to build failsafes all throughout the code in case the inevitable malfunction happened. And those malfunctions came, and her code self corrected and avoided plunging astronauts to their deat. Brilliant stuff.

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.

Re:Grace Hopper's resistance

[TheRaven64]

nobody tried to write one in a compiled language until Kernighan and Ritchie

That's simply not true. MULTICS was written in PL/1, the B5000 (1961) had an OS written in ALGOL60. Writing operating systems in high-level languages was common by the time UNIX came along, it was only rare on the very cheapest computers (where UNIX ran), and UNIX was written in assembly until the PDP-11 port.

Re:Grace Hopper's resistance

[silentcoder]

Yet Multics wasn't portable and when both Honeywell stopped making the hardware it basically died.

>Writing operating systems in high-level languages was common by the time UNIX came along
But writing them portably was not - Unix's single greatest contribution was proving that you can write a portable operating system, every aspect of it's design contributes to that - not just writing it in a high level language but breaking it down into a group of loosely coupled tiny programs that communicated using a simple (the simplest possible in fact) interface, treating everything as the simplest object (a file) - the whole thing was fundamentally designed for portability. Pre PDP-11 port versions were experiments with the idea, it wasn't unix until it was written in C.

Re:Grace Hopper's resistance

[_merlin]

COBOL really isn't such a bad language. It has some nice features, like native variants that map very well onto hierarchical data like XML. The biggest problem with COBOL is shitty COBOL programmers. The language makes it easy for idiots to make code that doesn't crash, so bad programmers can get poorly written code into production. Java has much the same problem, it isn't that Java's a bad language per se, just that it makes life too easy for bad programmers, so you get stuff that uses too much memory, allocates all the time, doesn't perform, and can't be maintained.

Re:Grace Hopper's resistance

[silentcoder]

My intended meaning was somewhere in between. I think COBOL was fantastic at what it was designed for - I just think it was the wrong thing to design something for. But I don't hold that against Hopper in the least, she was breaking entirely new ground - it's impossible to do that and know the best direction to take - by definition if you go into an entirely new field you're going to make missteps which other can ONLY avoid BECAUSE you made them.

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[serviscope_minor]

Yep, no one ever came up with a breakthrough in computer science. It was all solved by the 1950s and written up in text books.

What.

Re:Is it just me...

[silentcoder]

No. Just because you value the field of their contributions more, does not mean that her contribution to her field was any less - or even that the field is any less important. And it's not your decision to make.
If you want to choose who gets presidential medals of freedom - run for president.

Who should get a medal?

[myid]

Here's the list of the latest Medal of Freedom recipients.

That web page says

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the Nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

I'd like to see medals given to people who routinely save lives, like doctors, nurses, and emergency responders. If not the Medal of Freedom, then some other medal.

Also people who bring us our food and water, like farmers and water utility workers. We can live a matter of days without water, and weeks without food. So farmers and water utility workers are super important. But when's the last time you heard of a farmer getting a medal for producing a good crop, or a water utility worker getting a medal for supplying clean water?

Also caring teachers in the inner cities should get medals.

And people who risk their lives to rescue others in need, like these people.

Who else should get a medal?

Re:Sexist Shite

[Macthorpe]

Are the feminazis still pushing sexist nonsense like this ? After what the electorate told them at the last election ?

I think what the election told feminists was that you can be on tape as admitting to abusing women and still get voted in as president?

That fact doesn't really shut feminists up so much as prove them right.

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[Big Hairy Ian]

If it wasn't for Grace Hopper I wouldn't have to do any debugging

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[wonkey_monkey]

Margret Hamilton basically wrote the code that got us to the moon by literally punching

Bang! Zoom! Right to the moon!

Re:Great and long overdue!

[Daemonik]

I wonder what negative slant the Obama haters will come up with for this one?

*ahem*...

THIS IS JUST MORE RAMPANT SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR CLAPTRAP PISSING ON MEN! WHERE ARE THE MEDALS FOR THE MEN WHO BUILT THE MACHINE"S THESE WOMEN USED HUH??? WHAT ABOUT THEM, OBUMMER!?!?!

These "programmers" were just punching holes in paper. My kids can do that!!! What did they do that was so great huh??? Adding 1's and 0's? Guess what, it's 1 you elitist snobs, now where's my medal???

Thank GOD we prayed on it and JESUS TRUMP is going to make AMERICA GREAT AGAIN by putting women back where they belong. Everything was better when women wore sexy skirts and brought you drinks at work then stood around waiting for you to grab them by the p***y. Now they're just GODLESS hairy legged ABORTION machines, carrying dead fetuses up in their vaginas and trying to be equal to MEN. They're all HARLOTS and GOD will strike them down like they deserve. NASTY WOMAN!!! THROW HER IN JAIL!!!

Re:Is it just me...

[dywolf]

different kinds of courage and service to the nation, both similarly valuable.

Ellen absolutely deserves what she got, coming out publicly at a time when even TV and "liberal Hollywood" still played LGBT folks for laughs and mockery (and still do at time), risking her career in the process. But her doing so is a big factor in the swift public acceptance of LGBT folks over the past 2 decades, one of the fastest changes in cultural norms we've ever seen, as both she was seen as imminently likable by folks (instead of as "the other"), and for the inspiration she gave many other individuals who maybe wouldn't have had the courage to do so in their own lives, which also helped show people that this wasn't some phantom group of people that "regular folks" didn't know, but that in fact LGBT folks were themselves "regular folks", that most of us know one or two, and indeed there were already part of families and lives.

So yes, Ellen absolutely deserves it.

the full citation:

Ellen DeGeneres is an award-winning comedian who has hosted her popular daytime talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, since 2003 with her trademarked humor, humility, and optimism. In 2003 Ellen lent her voice to a forgetful but unforgettable little fish named Dory in Finding Nemo. She reprised her role again in 2016 with the hugely successful Finding Dory. Ellen also hosted the Academy Awards twice, in 2007 and 2014. In 1997, after coming out herself, DeGeneres made TV history when her character on Ellen revealed she was a lesbian. In her work and in her life, she has been a passionate advocate for equality and fairness.

You can read the others here, including Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, Bill and Melinda Gates, and others.

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[serviscope_minor]

She did no such thing. A few hundred people did this, and she partly wrote a small part of it and partly managed the rest.

It's odd, you know. There's a pattern here on slashdot. I mean most of the overt sexism has gone. Nonetheless, whenever there's a story like this there are always far, far more people coming out of the woodwork saying how the achievements are less than stated for a variety of plausible sounding reasons and yet those comments are few and far between when a guy is the subject.

She lead the project. Deal with it.

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[serviscope_minor]

"Just" applied mathematics?

Yep. What she did was just applied mathematics. When the next story about not so female tech luminary comes up (Torvalds), we can go back to fawning all over him. No claims of "just applied mathematics" there or claims the achievements were overstated.

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I don't have to "deal" with the fact that she was a project lead - that is well-known fact (since 1965, at least, but not in the 1962-1965 period). But the claim that "[she] basically wrote the code that got us to the moon by literally punching binary codes into hunreds if not thousands of feet of tape with a hole puncher and sticky tape, calculating how long each assembly instruction would take and working from there to build failsafes all throughout the code in case the inevitable malfunction happened" is laughably wrong and in all its parts (languages, storage technologies, programming methods, attribution etc.) easily disproven by reading relevant basic aterials, such as Mindell's Digital Apollo.

Your mention of sexism is confusingly random.

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[serviscope_minor]

You're being intellectually dishonest. You could have said "no, she didn't write all the code, she lead the team who wrote the lander code". That is a neutral eay of saying it. Instead you write this statement infused with negativity:

and she partly wrote a small part of it and partly managed the rest.

So yeah, that's your personal slant on it.

Your mention of sexism is confusingly random.

Except there is way more negativity and downplaying of achievements on threads about female luminaries versus male ones. So yeah few people actually come out with outrageously sexist comments, but to pretend the pattern does not exist, or to be wilfully blind to it is nearly as bad.

Re:I don't mean to sound like a downer

[K. S. Kyosuke]

At the start of the Apollo program, the onboard flight software needed to land on the moon didn't exist. Computer science wasn't in any college curriculum. NASA turned to mathematician Margaret Hamilton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to pioneer and direct the effort.

You see, this is exactly the kind of fact-free BS that irritates me. Here's a little reality check:

1) The AGC contract was indeed the first to be awarded during the Apollo program as a part of such, in mid-1961.

2) It was awarded to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory.

3) The major reason why it was awarded to the MIT IL was the accomplishments of Charles Stark Draper with inertial guidance, given the fact that accurate, fully autonomous guidance for a two-week period was considered a necessity for the project (at least at that point in time - the view slightly changed later due to success with radio-based navigation).

4) Some people at MIT IL, such as Eldon Hall, already had the expertise with similar guidance (albeit for shorter time periods) from the Polaris project. They made important hardware decisions very early on, such as the use of digital integrated circuits for the computer core.

5) Others, like Hal Laning, had already had expertise with more complicated software systems, such as compilers (Laning, Zierler, 1954: the first real algebraic compiler known) and real-time executives (which Laning adapted for Apollo with a priority-driven system).

6) Between 1961 and 1963, when many of these fundamental decisions were being made, Hamilton was working on the (military) SAGE project at Lincoln Labs, not at the Intrumentation Laboratory.

7) She only joined IL (and the AGC effort) apparently post-1963, initially in "junior" positions (in her own words), until she'd risen to management sometime in 1965.

In light of these fact, would you care to explain how exactly I'm supposed to see a quote that "At the start of the Apollo program ... NASA turned to mathematician Margaret Hamilton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to pioneer and direct the effort" as not blatantly misinformed? She was very definitely not the person they "turned to".