Technology and Engineering Atlas

How Things Are Built
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Engineer

Grace Hopper

Software Engineering

Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral who pioneered machine independent programming languages. Working on the Harvard Mark I during the Second World War and later on the UNIVAC I, she wrote the first compiler, a program that translates human readable source code into machine code, and her team development work fed directly into COBOL, one of the first widely used business programming languages. She is also credited with popularizing the term debugging after her team traced a computer malfunction to a moth trapped in a relay.

Facts
Birth Year
1906 1
Death Year
1992 1
Nationality
American 1
FAQs

What did Grace Hopper contribute to programming languages?

She wrote the first compiler and her team's work fed into COBOL.

Working on the Harvard Mark I during the Second World War and later on the UNIVAC I, Hopper wrote the first compiler, a program that translates human readable source code into machine code. Her team's development work fed directly into COBOL, one of the first widely used business programming languages. She is also credited with popularizing the term debugging after her team traced a computer malfunction to a moth trapped in a relay.
Connections

Associated With

Developed the first compiler and helped found the discipline of software engineering practice.

In Field

Source Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information AgeKurt W. Beyer

Invented

Compiler, Inventions

Her team at Remington Rand wrote the compiler for the A-0 programming language in May 1952 and coined the term compiler.

In the Other Atlases

Nationality

Also in Geography Atlas: the nationality of this subject.

Sources
1. Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
Kurt W. Beyer, MIT Press, 2009
Grace Hopper (Wikipedia)
In Group: Software and Programming Pioneers, Introduction
Quote, In Group: Software and Programming Pioneers, Introduction
She was a pioneer of computer programming.
View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.