[TUHS] Happy birthday, Grace Hopper!

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Grace Hopper!

[Dave Horsfall]

OK, slightly OT...

Rear Admiral Grace ("Amazing") Hopper PhD was given unto us in 1906.  She 
was famous for coining the term "debugging", whereby a moth was removed 
from a relay contact in a *real* computer[*].

However, she must be condemned for giving us COBOL; yes, I know that vile 
language, but I carefully leave it off my CV, as it seemed to be designed 
for suits (Business Studies of course, but nothing technical) to spy upon 
their programmers.

[*]
Defined, of course, where you could open a door and step inside it; I 
actually did that once.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Grace Hopper!

[John Cowan]

Dave Horsfall scripsit:

> Rear Admiral Grace ("Amazing") Hopper PhD was given unto us in 1906.  She 
> was famous for coining the term "debugging", whereby a moth was removed 
> from a relay contact in a *real* computer[*].

Well, no.  The moth incident happened in 1947, and the OED lists the word
"debugging" as first appearing in print in 1945 in a British journal.
Hopper may or may not have known that: certainly she was consciously
punning on the existing word "bug", which went right back to Edison's
laboratory and first appeared in print (per the OED) in 1889.

> However, she must be condemned for giving us COBOL; yes, I know that vile 
> language, 

I know it too, and there is nothing blameworthy about it.  We wouldn't get
far nowadays without records, and they first appeared in Cobol (or rather
its direct ancestor Flow-Matic) in 1959, more than a decade before any
other programming language had them.  Longer, if you accept that PL/I
would not have taken the shape it did if Cobol had not existed.  Yes,
Cobol is clunky and archaic; lots of people think Lisp is archaic too.
But it met a need at a particular time, and very successfully so.

The pseudo-readability was meant, at least by Hopper herself, to help
customers rather than managers understand the code.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to [Sam], a grey-clad
moving hill.  Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes,
but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him
does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are
but memories of his girth and his majesty.  --"Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit"

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Grace Hopper!

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday,  9 December 2015 at  4:34:47 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>
> However, she must be condemned for giving us COBOL; yes, I know that
> vile language, but I carefully leave it off my CV, as it seemed to
> be designed for suits (Business Studies of course, but nothing
> technical) to spy upon their programmers.

And you for giving me bad dreams?  As it happens, round the time you
posted this message, I had a dream of a 180 page printout of a COBOL
program, completely without comments.  The first time COBOL has
haunted me in decades.

Greg
--
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Grace Hopper!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 8 Dec 2015, Brantley Coile wrote:

> We were indeed lucky that admiral hooper was with us. I know people who 
> still cherish their "nano" seconds.

Ah yes, the 1ft piece of wire...  Got a photo of it?

> By the way, she wouldn't have said she coined the term "debugging". That 
> is at least as old as Thomas Edison. She said she was the first to a 
> actually find a real bug!

For those who may be new around here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper#/media/File:H96566k.jpg

Yes, that is a real bug, found inside a real computer.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."