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Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of COBOL, Dies at 89 (nytimes.com)
theodp writes:
A NY Times obituary reports that early software engineer and co-designer of COBOL Jean Sammet died on May 20 in Maryland at age 89. "Sammet was a graduate student in math when she first encountered a computer in 1949 at the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign," the Times reports. While Grace Hopper is often called the "mother of COBOL," Hopper "was not one of the six people, including Sammet, who designed the language -- a fact Sammet rarely failed to point out... 'I yield to no one in my admiration for Grace,' she said. 'But she was not the mother, creator or developer of COBOL.'"
By 1960 the Pentagon had announced it wouldn't buy computers unless they ran COBOL, inadvertently creating an industry standard. COBOL "really was very good at handling formatted data," Brian Kernighan, tells the Times, which reports that today "More than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are now in use and an estimated 2 billion lines are added or changed each year, according to IBM Research."
Sammet was entirely self-taught, and in an interview two months ago shared a story about how her supervisor in 1955 had asked if she wanted to become a computer programmer. "What's a programmer?" she asked. He replied, "I don't know, but I know we need one." Within five years she'd become the section head of MOBIDIC Programming at Sylvania Electric Products, and had helped design COBOL -- before moving on to IBM, where she worked for the next 27 years and created the FORTRAN-based computer algebra system FORMAC.
By 1960 the Pentagon had announced it wouldn't buy computers unless they ran COBOL, inadvertently creating an industry standard. COBOL "really was very good at handling formatted data," Brian Kernighan, tells the Times, which reports that today "More than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are now in use and an estimated 2 billion lines are added or changed each year, according to IBM Research."
Sammet was entirely self-taught, and in an interview two months ago shared a story about how her supervisor in 1955 had asked if she wanted to become a computer programmer. "What's a programmer?" she asked. He replied, "I don't know, but I know we need one." Within five years she'd become the section head of MOBIDIC Programming at Sylvania Electric Products, and had helped design COBOL -- before moving on to IBM, where she worked for the next 27 years and created the FORTRAN-based computer algebra system FORMAC.
I think you misunderstood the meaning of that quote. The "PHB" (as you call him) obviously realized that computers needed people specialized in programming in the future rather than the jack-of-all-trades people involved in the early stages of computer evolution. However programming wasn't well defined at the time, not even programming languages had developed to a well defined stage.
TL;DR IMHO more insightful than PHB-worthy.
This is why "brogrammers" disgust me. Yes, I've seen a lot of women drop out of the profession. Often to become parents, sometimes to move into management or project administration, sometimes for reasons unknown. But "J. Sammet" is an author or co-author of a lot of the historical computer literature in my library. You'll find her name in Knuth, in collections by Flores, and other places besides. She may not have been as publicly visible as Adm. Hopper or even Margaret Hamilton, but she helped build the foundations for modern-day IT.
In addition to valuable contributions in the field of programming language design, she was also the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery, back when the real nerds all belonged to ACM.
Much of the testosterone-laden crap from Silicon Valley, as well as "normal" programming from the world all over would not have been possible without someone like Sammet to lead the way.
It's sad that she never got the full recognition she deserved from the world at large - even the appearance announcement here is 2 weeks late. Although her peers respected her greatly. We've lost a giant unawares.
What's a girl gotta do to get noticed around here?
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