Among the many documents available at the Computer History Museum website there is an interesting artifact: a commercial brochure published in 1957 by the Remington Rand UNIVAC, “a division of Sperry Rand Corporation”, titled “introducing a new language for automatic programming”. In it, we learn about the advantages of the new (at the time) FLOW-MATIC programming language, the brainchild of United States Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper.
On page five of this brochure we find, among an enumeration of six key advantages of FLOW-MATIC, a beautiful quote that resonates strongly in the soul of this magazine:
Breaks the Communications Barrier Between Programming and Management Groups
Since FLOW-MATIC uses English through all preliminary stages of an application, the programming is intelligible to all who understand the application. This makes available to the programming effort the knowledge of many experts previously excluded.
The impossible dialogue was already a problem in 1957. I do not think this should be a surprise to anyone.
Contrary to the popular lore, Grace Hopper neither came up with the idea of the compiler, nor wrote the first one from scratch; the truth is a bit more subtle, as explained on a post published in 2022 on the Communications of the ACM blog:
These elucidations can be summarized as follows: Heinz Rutishauser was the first to propose automatic programming (machine translation with the aid of the computer, 1951/52) and Grace Hopper developed the first utility programs for the management of subprograms (1952). Alick Glennie lays claim to the first true compiler that actually operated on a computer (1952).
But we are not interested in knowing who did what first; this is not a Grand Prix. We do know that Grace Hopper was the first to refer to program errors as “bugs”, as explained on the Fireship YouTube channel:
This month’s Vidéothèque video starts with the quintessential founding myth of our craft: Grace Hopper finding the legendary moth (“bug”) stuck in her computer. According to the narrator, and quite truthfully so, developers these days can create their own bugs thanks to, you guessed it, code editors.
Ms Hopper also effectively designed a series of interpreters and compilers (A-0, ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC, and FLOW-MATIC) leading to her participation in the COBOL committee, which included a distinguished group of pioneers featuring none other than Bob Bemer, the creator of IBM’s COMTRAN programming language.
What is important to remember, though, is that Ms Hopper had a hard time convincing her management of the importance of the idea of having a program translating an English-like language into machine codes, as explained on a recent article on IEEE Spectrum:
“I had a running compiler, and nobody would touch it, because they carefully told me computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs,” Hopper said. “It was a selling job to get people to try it. I think with any new idea, because people are allergic to change, you have to get out and sell the idea.”
It took two years for the company’s leadership to accept the A-0.
Today, thankfully, the location where Ms Hopper created the A-0 compiler is recorded with an IEEE Milestone recognition plaque at the University of Pennsylvania.
Grace Hopper was chosen by famed photographer Lynn Gilbert among 46 pioneering American women to be interviewed for her 1982 book “Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Times”. Ms Hopper shared those pages with luminaires such as Billie Jean King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Julia Child, among others. (Kids: if you do not know who these women are, look them up and read their Wikipedia entries. Please.)
There is a freely available chapter (well, at least at the time of this publication) of “Women of Wisdom”, a selection of 12 of those 46 interviews, published in 2018 by the same Lynn Gilbert, featuring two major gems in Grace Hopper’s interview that I would like to highlight here. The first is the not-so-obvious realization that the computer industry is a direct offspring of the United States’ government spending, and that the current defunding, as presently led by some techbro oligarchs, can only spell disaster.
I think one of the reasons we’re not getting those kinds of innovations today is that government support has almost totally disappeared, and with inflation, companies themselves have cut back on the amount they spend on research. They may spend the same amount but because of inflation it doesn’t have as much effect. You’ll notice that much of the equipment we’re using today is the result of the work done right after World War II—the forties and early fifties.
The second quote is the same Grace Hopper reminding us that computers, as they were originally designed, were meant to work for humans and to make their lives easier, not the other way around.
My vision of a world with computers is a world in which people have a lot more time to do what they like, to do what they want to do and read the books they want to read. It won’t make books obsolete, it’s too tiring to read on computers. Playing tennis, jogging… they’ll have plenty of time to go to the shore. I’d go over to the library and start digging through books. I could do my work at home. I could have a computer at home and talk to my office. I could live up on top of a nice mountain in New Hampshire and smell pine trees and it would be the same as if I were here in the sub-sub-subbasement of the Pentagon.
Amazing Grace, we hear you.
The cover picture of Lynn Gilbert’s book features a 1977 photograph of Grace Hopper snapped by (you guessed it) Gilbert herself, and for those of you interested, it is part of a limited set and its silver gelatin print, available at the Ilon Art Gallery of New York, sells for a modicum sum of USD 2'500.
Ms Hopper was a fearless fighter against the impossible dialogue. In the book “A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century” by Nicholas Metropolis, Jack Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota, there is a chapter titled “The Early Development of Programming Languages”, available at the Internet Archive, written by none other than Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo. In turn, this chapter quotes Grace Hopper’s 1959 paper “Automatic programming: present status and future trends” in pages 217 and 218, with this outstanding excerpt:
I used to be a mathematics professor. At that time I found there were a certain number of students who could not learn mathematics. I then was charged with the job of making it easy for businessmen to use our computers. I found it was not a question of whether they could learn mathematics or not, but whether they would.… They said, “Throw those symbols out–I do not know what they mean, I have not time to learn symbols.” I suggest a reply to those who would like data processing people to use mathematical symbols that they make them first attempt to teach those symbols to vice-presidents or a colonel or admiral. I assure you that I tried it.
Check out this month’s Vidéothèque entry, Grace Hopper’s appearance at NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman”, aired October 2nd, 1986. This witty, charming, funny, and outstandingly brilliant person, the real “Queen of Software”, spontaneously produced a memorable quote for posterity:
Letterman: How did you know so much about computers then?
Hopper: I didn’t–this was the first one.
Cover snapshot chosen by the author, precisely right after the audience erupts in laughter after Grace Hopper’s reply, and Letterman’s realizes the brilliance of the moment.