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.

Comments

Hopper & COBOL

[Tablizer]

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.'"

Although different people give different accounts, the gist of what happened as I gather it was that the committee became on a whole argumentative and split into generally two groups: those who wanted to just finish the project, and the others who felt better theories were needed first before laying down a language.

Because time was running out, the get-it-done group borrowed heavily from existing languages, including Grace's languages. Because their mandate was to make COBOL "English-like", Grace's work was the furthest along in this regard, at least in a practical sense. Thus, COBOL borrowed a good many ideas from Grace's languages.

From the article: "COBOL was initially intended as a short-term solution to the problem of handling business data -- a technology that might be useful for a year or two until something better came along."

Re: END-PERFORM

[PolygamousRanchKid]

//COBBSTEP JOB CLASS=6,NOTIFY=&SYSUID
//
//STEP10 EXEC PGM=MYPROG,PARM=ACCT5000
//STEPLIB DD DSN=MYDATA.URMI.LOADLIB,DISP=SHR
//INPUT1 DD DSN=MYDATA.URMI.INPUT,DISP=SHR
//OUT1 DD SYSOUT=*
//OUT2 DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSIN DD *
//CUST1 1000
//CUST2 1001

/*

It makes me a little sad.

[Joe Branya]

Six people developed COBAL during a set of 1959 allnighters in a NYC hotel room. One was a woman. Did any of the men get a NYT obit?

They were all important figures in their day but only one gets the Times treatment because the NYT is on a "Women in technology" kick. Death as newshook for an editorial.

They did the same thing with Grace Hopper. Now Grace was a shrewd, funny lady. I used to drive her to Mensa meeting in the 1970s. She lived in a high-rise in Arlington, Va and I lived nearby. One time, with rain pouring through a hole in my convertible's roof, I apologized for getting her soaked and we talked about her elderly, leaky, model A Ford, which somehow made it through WWII via a couple of engine rebuilds she did on her kitchen table. She liked guys- they helped her drag the motor up the stairs.

Grace and Miss Sammet did share one thing; they never married and never had children or grandchildren. Making that whole thing work - the relationship; the long, intellectually challenging hours; the reality of raising children- is easier now but, take my word for it, the young tech girls here in Austin still talk about it, especially in private among themselves.

All I can say is "So long Jean. So long Grace.", dying alone in a nursing home. It all makes me a little sad.