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Talk:Women in Science and Mathematics (view source)
Revision as of 02:38, June 17, 2011
, 02:38, June 17, 2011→Grace Hopper: new section
:So I really don't know what the right place is for discussing the topic. [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 22:00, 11 June 2011 (EDT)
:So I really don't know what the right place is for discussing the topic. [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 22:00, 11 June 2011 (EDT)
== Grace Hopper ==
Ed Poor asks (in an edit comment)
:Did Grace Hopper create COBOL all by herself? Did she build or invent a computer?
I think the best description was that she was technical lead of the team that created COBOL. As such, she deserves an enormous amount of credit for having the vision to see that a high-level computer language was possible, and for seeing the project through. She did not invent a computer. Computers had been invented before she came along. Many people get partial credit as inventors of the computer. Zuse, Atanasoff, Berry, Eckert, Mauchly, Aiken, von Neumann, and, of course, Babbage, are a few that I can think of just now. (And, of course, electronic computers depended on electronic innovations by people like Fleming, DeForest, Eccles, and Jordan.)
Grace Hopper did not build a computer either. She was a software person, though, in those days, you couldn't be just a software person or a hardware person; you had to know at least something about both. And Grace Hopper had good intuition about when a problem might be caused by a moth in the hardware :-)
Also, I don't think it's really right to call her "one of the world's first" programmers, though this comes down to just what such phrases connote. (It's sort of like what people commonly think "a few means" and what "several" means. It's a matter of subtle linguistic nuance.) To me, "one of the world's first" suggests something like "one of the first five", which she wasn't. I would say she was "one of the early computer programmers" or "a pioneer in the programming field", or something like that.
[[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 22:38, 16 June 2011 (EDT)