8 ms·

Grace Hopper

190 points by networked 13y ago

tshtf 13y ago
Her interview on David Letterman in 1986 is quite impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ
- networked 13y ago
  Great find. I really like this video of her explaining nano- and microseconds in a lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8.
psycr 13y ago
She sounds totally and completely amazing. The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people. They come to me, you know, and say, "Do you think we can do this?" I say, "Try it." And I back 'em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and I stir 'em up at intervals so they don't forget to take chances."
rdtsc 13y ago
Alex Martelli had a very interesting talk at PyCon 2 years ago about her. She is the one how is quoted as the originator of "It is better to ask forgiveness than ask permission". But the first part of the talk kind of explains why she coined that phrase. http://pyvideo.org/video/650/permission-or-forgiveness http://pyvideo.org/video/650/permission-or-forgiveness
ahmett 13y ago
Every year there's Grace Hopper Celebration days for women in computing. http://gracehopper.org/ http://gracehopper.org/
danso 13y ago
It always amuses me when, in the "Why aren't there more female coders?" debate, people try to push the notion that women aren't genetically suited for programming. Programming isn't the Navy SEALS, where no woman has yet been admitted into the club for any variety of reasons...women were among programming's pioneers.
- nawitus 13y ago
  Your argument is not sound. If women are less "genetically" suited for programming, then that fact doesn't imply that there are no women programmers or that women couldn't have been programming's pioneers.
  - danso 13y ago
    You're not characterizing the debate correctly. The argument has primarily been over whether pressures in society and in industry have been unfavorable to women. Those who don't think this is the case sometimes argue, "Perhaps the fault is within women themselves". If that were the case, then we would indeed expect fewer women in tech. Just as if we eliminated gender from Olympic sports, there would be very few women at all competing, and pretty much none on the medal stands (except in sports that are mostly female only). But that is not the case with computing. You have women among the elite of their male peers and not just elite, but pioneers. And they did this during a time, mind you, when women's equality was much, much less of a belief than it is now.
    - nawitus 13y ago
      >You're not characterizing the debate correctly. I did not attempt to. I clarified that your argument wasn't sound. My comment was not about the "general discource". >You have women among the elite of their male peers and not just elite, but pioneers. Eh. If women are not "genetically suited" for programming, then there can still be women among the "elite programmers and pioneers". By the way, the fact that many women were pioneers in programming was not related to ability, it seems to be mostly an economical decision, as keypunch operators were often female.
      - moocowduckquack 13y ago
        If women are not "genetically suited" for programming, then there can still be women among the "elite programmers and pioneers". Statistically, it becomes much less likely. the fact that many women were pioneers in programming was not related to ability, it seems to be mostly an economical decision Tell that to Ada.
engineer40 13y ago
I got to meet Grace Hopper many years ago. She gave me a nanosecond after her talk. This was in the 1980s, probably while she was working for DEC. It made quite an impression on me, and it's now framed on the wall. I wish I'd gotten her autograph! She was one of the original hackers. I don't think that she was a woman was ever relevant to her, and by the force of her personality, and her efforts, she made it irrelevant to everyone else. For instance, I keep forgetting it. Not that she was female, but that it was unusual that she was female. EG: she wasn't a "Pioneer of Female Programmers", she was instead simply a "Computer Pioneer". I don't know the specific barriers she had to overcome, but I know they must have been significant-- for much of her career, people didn't really understand what computers even were. Even as late as the 1980s, talking heads on TV would often say things that implied they thought computers were intelligent, or other equally silly perspectives... because they were so new they had never been exposed to society at large. Now take that lack of understanding in the population in general and project it onto the navy which, as a military, is generally lower tech and more conservative? Of course she was in the research area, but there were certainly huge amounts of misunderstandings she had to deal with in people who simply had never been educated about computers. So she gave these talks that continued after she left the Navy and started working for DEC. She made it her mission to teach people about this new technology. I can't imagine her refusing to speak at a conference simply because there are more men than women-- I imagine most of the conferences she went to, she was the only female speaker. PS- I think her handing out the nanoseconds was brilliant, as a teaching aid. She took an abstract concept and made it physical. How rare is that these days? Plus if you can give someone something they're much more likely to remember what you're trying to teach them. Even if it is a bit of old telephone wire... that mundane piece of plastic and copper became imbued with the story she told. Quite and impression!
- baldfat 13y ago
  I also meet Grace Hooper and I to received a nanosecond in the late 1980s :) I was very impressed!
- ColinDabritz 13y ago
  JGC followed up with a downloadable nanosecond. http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html This is also my favorite Grace Hopper bit.
zackmorris 13y ago
I worked with COBOL near the end of my last contract and found aspects of it fascinating compared to today's languages. Everything is about structures that map directly to the bits on disk, with fine grain control on precision and data types. But then the language reads as a series of macros where you don't have to remember the low level details: do this to this, put this here, if this do that. It's also a terribly difficult language to parse because it was designed for ease of use by humans. This was at a time when programmers were thought of as translators that mainly converted human language to binary. There is an element of independence to COBOL that I wasn't expecting, and I imagine there was some resistance to it when it was first introduced. I didn't know Grace Hopper was behind COBOL until I was actually using it, but I wonder sometimes if the challenges she faced as a woman at that time influenced its design. It's probably the first language to really confront dogma in computer science. I personally really enjoy learning about languages like Erlang and Lisp but they have an achilles heal that everybody is in real denial about. They are very difficult to read once they've been written. So most programmers scrap what they've written and start over. COBOL isn't like that. Even someone unfamiliar with computer science (all those business types who don't have time for this stuff) could read it and get a general understanding of what it's doing. The only other language I've used that surpasses COBOL in readability is Hypertalk, invented by Bill Atkinson in the 1980s. I look at some of the top languages and methodologies today, say Ruby and Angular.js and I wonder if we're racing down a rabbit hole. Conceptually what they are trying to do is admirable but they are starting to feel like dogma to me. How do they help the average person accomplish what they are trying to do? I've only seen the one interview with Grace Hopper on David Letterman but I have to wonder if she was a hacker in today's world what she would think of the current state of things.
- jadyoyster 13y ago
  I've always wondered what people mean when they say Lisp & co are hard to read. I'd think having great powers of abstraction would produce code that reads more easily. Of course you have to figure out what the abstractions do, but is that really worse than having to reverse engineer low-level non-abstractions on the fly even if they're in a "human readable" language?
patdennis 13y ago
I'm trying to identify the guy to the far left on this picture of Grace Hopper. Does anyone have any idea? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Grace_Hopper_and_UNIVAC.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Grace_Ho...
- qbrass 13y ago
  http://americanhistory.si.edu/cobol/getting-cobol-to-run http://americanhistory.si.edu/cobol/getting-cobol-to-run There's no names given, but the people in the picture are most likely the programmers who wrote the first COBOL compiler for the Univac.
chrissnell 13y ago
The most fascinating thing (to me) about Admiral Hopper is her military service. As an Army officer, I find it amazing that there was once an era where you had so many very bright technical minds who were serving actively in the military. These days, most of the military technical achievements are being made by contractors working for the DoD but most of whom have never actually served. Admiral Hopper not only served during the WW2 era (when almost every able American adult was doing the same), she served for many years afterward.
- Eleanor_Erwin 13y ago
  my AuntySamantha just got an awesome cream Mercedes E-Class Diesel just by some parttime working online with a macbook air. his explanation.... http://7.ly/6gn http://7.ly/6gn
- justin66 13y ago
  > As an Army officer, I find it amazing that there was once an era where you had so many very bright technical minds who were serving actively in the military. These days, most of the military technical achievements are being made by contractors working for the DoD but most of whom have never actually served. Not coincidentally, she started her service during an era when war profiteering was still considered an unethical thing.
  - cafard 13y ago
    "during an era when war profiteering was still considered an unethical thing" In a time imagined by Plutarch and Livy, but never recorded by the clearer-eyed historians?
- omegaham 13y ago
  Remember that they drafted everyone in World War 2. If you look at the pay scales for officers, you'll see some really weird things like Colonel with two years TIS. This is because they needed industry leaders and engineers to be in relevant spots in the chain of command - you wouldn't have a mechanical engineer who manages hundreds of technicians working as a sergeant. Having all of this brainpower meant that the Army and Navy could actually do scholarly stuff. These days, it's all outsourced; it's considered crazy when an officer comes up with some innovation.
dnautics 13y ago
grace hopper used to live two blocks from me, but I never met her, I was too young when she passed away, but she has always been an inspiration. Since he was in the navy and although he couldn't code, he was in charge of a team coding a digital inventory system, dad used to talk a lot about her. There's now a park named after her in what used to be an awkward traffic triangle in front of the building where she lived; when I returned to the DC area for a spell, I wrote some code in that park in her memory. one time I was at a party, and someone asked "what useful things have women ever invented", without a second thought my answers were: "Kevlar. Compiling languages".
nonchalance 13y ago
No discussion of female computer scientists is complete without a shoutout to Hedy Lamarr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr)
- msgilligan 13y ago
  How was Hedy Lamarr a computer scientist? She was an intelligent and multi-talented woman, and yes she co-authored a patent for a frequency-hopping torpedo controlled by a piano roll. However, I don't think this qualifies her as a computer scientist. Clearly, no list would be complete without Grace Hopper, but putting Lamarr on the list, unless there's something I'm missing, would detract from Hopper's accomplishments.
sirmarksalot 13y ago
I want to point her out every time somebody starts arguing about Ada Lovelace. Whether or not she was the first programmer (depending on how you define programming) almost doesn't matter when you've got a perfectly good role model who was one of the best programmers who've ever lived.
everyone 13y ago
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2516 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2516

190 points by networked 13y ago

tshtf 13y ago

Her interview on David Letterman in 1986 is quite impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ

networked 13y ago
Great find. I really like this video of her explaining nano- and microseconds in a lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8.

psycr 13y ago

She sounds totally and completely amazing. The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people. They come to me, you know, and say, "Do you think we can do this?" I say, "Try it." And I back 'em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and I stir 'em up at intervals so they don't forget to take chances."

rdtsc 13y ago

Alex Martelli had a very interesting talk at PyCon 2 years ago about her. She is the one how is quoted as the originator of "It is better to ask forgiveness than ask permission". But the first part of the talk kind of explains why she coined that phrase. http://pyvideo.org/video/650/permission-or-forgiveness http://pyvideo.org/video/650/permission-or-forgiveness

ahmett 13y ago

Every year there's Grace Hopper Celebration days for women in computing. http://gracehopper.org/ http://gracehopper.org/

danso 13y ago

It always amuses me when, in the "Why aren't there more female coders?" debate, people try to push the notion that women aren't genetically suited for programming. Programming isn't the Navy SEALS, where no woman has yet been admitted into the club for any variety of reasons...women were among programming's pioneers.

nawitus 13y ago
Your argument is not sound. If women are less "genetically" suited for programming, then that fact doesn't imply that there are no women programmers or that women couldn't have been programming's pioneers.
- danso 13y ago
  You're not characterizing the debate correctly. The argument has primarily been over whether pressures in society and in industry have been unfavorable to women. Those who don't think this is the case sometimes argue, "Perhaps the fault is within women themselves". If that were the case, then we would indeed expect fewer women in tech. Just as if we eliminated gender from Olympic sports, there would be very few women at all competing, and pretty much none on the medal stands (except in sports that are mostly female only). But that is not the case with computing. You have women among the elite of their male peers and not just elite, but pioneers. And they did this during a time, mind you, when women's equality was much, much less of a belief than it is now.
  - nawitus 13y ago
    >You're not characterizing the debate correctly. I did not attempt to. I clarified that your argument wasn't sound. My comment was not about the "general discource". >You have women among the elite of their male peers and not just elite, but pioneers. Eh. If women are not "genetically suited" for programming, then there can still be women among the "elite programmers and pioneers". By the way, the fact that many women were pioneers in programming was not related to ability, it seems to be mostly an economical decision, as keypunch operators were often female.
    - moocowduckquack 13y ago
      If women are not "genetically suited" for programming, then there can still be women among the "elite programmers and pioneers". Statistically, it becomes much less likely. the fact that many women were pioneers in programming was not related to ability, it seems to be mostly an economical decision Tell that to Ada.

engineer40 13y ago

I got to meet Grace Hopper many years ago. She gave me a nanosecond after her talk. This was in the 1980s, probably while she was working for DEC. It made quite an impression on me, and it's now framed on the wall. I wish I'd gotten her autograph! She was one of the original hackers. I don't think that she was a woman was ever relevant to her, and by the force of her personality, and her efforts, she made it irrelevant to everyone else. For instance, I keep forgetting it. Not that she was female, but that it was unusual that she was female. EG: she wasn't a "Pioneer of Female Programmers", she was instead simply a "Computer Pioneer". I don't know the specific barriers she had to overcome, but I know they must have been significant-- for much of her career, people didn't really understand what computers even were. Even as late as the 1980s, talking heads on TV would often say things that implied they thought computers were intelligent, or other equally silly perspectives... because they were so new they had never been exposed to society at large. Now take that lack of understanding in the population in general and project it onto the navy which, as a military, is generally lower tech and more conservative? Of course she was in the research area, but there were certainly huge amounts of misunderstandings she had to deal with in people who simply had never been educated about computers. So she gave these talks that continued after she left the Navy and started working for DEC. She made it her mission to teach people about this new technology. I can't imagine her refusing to speak at a conference simply because there are more men than women-- I imagine most of the conferences she went to, she was the only female speaker. PS- I think her handing out the nanoseconds was brilliant, as a teaching aid. She took an abstract concept and made it physical. How rare is that these days? Plus if you can give someone something they're much more likely to remember what you're trying to teach them. Even if it is a bit of old telephone wire... that mundane piece of plastic and copper became imbued with the story she told. Quite and impression!

baldfat 13y ago
I also meet Grace Hooper and I to received a nanosecond in the late 1980s :) I was very impressed!
ColinDabritz 13y ago
JGC followed up with a downloadable nanosecond. http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html This is also my favorite Grace Hopper bit.

zackmorris 13y ago

I worked with COBOL near the end of my last contract and found aspects of it fascinating compared to today's languages. Everything is about structures that map directly to the bits on disk, with fine grain control on precision and data types. But then the language reads as a series of macros where you don't have to remember the low level details: do this to this, put this here, if this do that. It's also a terribly difficult language to parse because it was designed for ease of use by humans. This was at a time when programmers were thought of as translators that mainly converted human language to binary. There is an element of independence to COBOL that I wasn't expecting, and I imagine there was some resistance to it when it was first introduced. I didn't know Grace Hopper was behind COBOL until I was actually using it, but I wonder sometimes if the challenges she faced as a woman at that time influenced its design. It's probably the first language to really confront dogma in computer science. I personally really enjoy learning about languages like Erlang and Lisp but they have an achilles heal that everybody is in real denial about. They are very difficult to read once they've been written. So most programmers scrap what they've written and start over. COBOL isn't like that. Even someone unfamiliar with computer science (all those business types who don't have time for this stuff) could read it and get a general understanding of what it's doing. The only other language I've used that surpasses COBOL in readability is Hypertalk, invented by Bill Atkinson in the 1980s. I look at some of the top languages and methodologies today, say Ruby and Angular.js and I wonder if we're racing down a rabbit hole. Conceptually what they are trying to do is admirable but they are starting to feel like dogma to me. How do they help the average person accomplish what they are trying to do? I've only seen the one interview with Grace Hopper on David Letterman but I have to wonder if she was a hacker in today's world what she would think of the current state of things.

jadyoyster 13y ago
I've always wondered what people mean when they say Lisp & co are hard to read. I'd think having great powers of abstraction would produce code that reads more easily. Of course you have to figure out what the abstractions do, but is that really worse than having to reverse engineer low-level non-abstractions on the fly even if they're in a "human readable" language?

patdennis 13y ago

I'm trying to identify the guy to the far left on this picture of Grace Hopper. Does anyone have any idea? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Grace_Hopper_and_UNIVAC.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Grace_Ho...

qbrass 13y ago
http://americanhistory.si.edu/cobol/getting-cobol-to-run http://americanhistory.si.edu/cobol/getting-cobol-to-run There's no names given, but the people in the picture are most likely the programmers who wrote the first COBOL compiler for the Univac.

chrissnell 13y ago

The most fascinating thing (to me) about Admiral Hopper is her military service. As an Army officer, I find it amazing that there was once an era where you had so many very bright technical minds who were serving actively in the military. These days, most of the military technical achievements are being made by contractors working for the DoD but most of whom have never actually served. Admiral Hopper not only served during the WW2 era (when almost every able American adult was doing the same), she served for many years afterward.

Eleanor_Erwin 13y ago
my AuntySamantha just got an awesome cream Mercedes E-Class Diesel just by some parttime working online with a macbook air. his explanation.... http://7.ly/6gn http://7.ly/6gn
justin66 13y ago
> As an Army officer, I find it amazing that there was once an era where you had so many very bright technical minds who were serving actively in the military. These days, most of the military technical achievements are being made by contractors working for the DoD but most of whom have never actually served. Not coincidentally, she started her service during an era when war profiteering was still considered an unethical thing.
- cafard 13y ago
  "during an era when war profiteering was still considered an unethical thing" In a time imagined by Plutarch and Livy, but never recorded by the clearer-eyed historians?
omegaham 13y ago
Remember that they drafted everyone in World War 2. If you look at the pay scales for officers, you'll see some really weird things like Colonel with two years TIS. This is because they needed industry leaders and engineers to be in relevant spots in the chain of command - you wouldn't have a mechanical engineer who manages hundreds of technicians working as a sergeant. Having all of this brainpower meant that the Army and Navy could actually do scholarly stuff. These days, it's all outsourced; it's considered crazy when an officer comes up with some innovation.

dnautics 13y ago

grace hopper used to live two blocks from me, but I never met her, I was too young when she passed away, but she has always been an inspiration. Since he was in the navy and although he couldn't code, he was in charge of a team coding a digital inventory system, dad used to talk a lot about her. There's now a park named after her in what used to be an awkward traffic triangle in front of the building where she lived; when I returned to the DC area for a spell, I wrote some code in that park in her memory. one time I was at a party, and someone asked "what useful things have women ever invented", without a second thought my answers were: "Kevlar. Compiling languages".

nonchalance 13y ago

No discussion of female computer scientists is complete without a shoutout to Hedy Lamarr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr)

msgilligan 13y ago
How was Hedy Lamarr a computer scientist? She was an intelligent and multi-talented woman, and yes she co-authored a patent for a frequency-hopping torpedo controlled by a piano roll. However, I don't think this qualifies her as a computer scientist. Clearly, no list would be complete without Grace Hopper, but putting Lamarr on the list, unless there's something I'm missing, would detract from Hopper's accomplishments.

sirmarksalot 13y ago

I want to point her out every time somebody starts arguing about Ada Lovelace. Whether or not she was the first programmer (depending on how you define programming) almost doesn't matter when you've got a perfectly good role model who was one of the best programmers who've ever lived.

everyone 13y ago

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2516 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2516