Grace Hopper and the compiler nobody wanted to use

Grace Murray Hopper held a PhD in mathematics from Yale and was a professor when she joined the US Navy reserve, in 1943, during the Second World War. She was sent to Harvard, to program the Mark I, one of the first electromechanical computers.

The no

After the war, Hopper went to work on the UNIVAC, one of the first commercial computers. In the 1950s, she had an idea that seems obvious today: instead of writing each instruction in machine code, the programmer would write in something closer to human language, and the computer itself would translate it. The program that does this translation is called a compiler. Hers, the A-0, is from 1952.

Nobody wanted it. Years later, in remarks reproduced by the OCLC newsletter in 1987, she put it this way: "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."

What they did

Hopper persisted. She kept developing compilers and the FLOW-MATIC language, which used English words. That work was one of the foundations of COBOL, defined in 1959, a business language that still runs in bank and government systems.

She stayed in the Navy until 79, reached the rank of rear admiral and spent decades giving lectures. She liked to hand the audience pieces of wire about 30 centimeters long, the distance light travels in a nanosecond, to show why every nanosecond matters.

A story from the time became folklore: in 1947, the Mark II team found a moth trapped in a relay and taped it into the logbook, with the note "first actual case of bug being found". The word "bug" already existed in engineering; the moth became famous because of the joke.

What this has to do with Bairo

Grace Hopper was told the machine wouldn't do what she had already seen the machine do. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows that kind of no: he tells how he tried to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality to his own business, years before it became a trend, and was told it wouldn't work. That time, he gave up. He kept the lesson.

There's a deeper parallel. Hopper wanted people to speak to the machine in their own language. Bairo speaks of artificial intelligence as an extension of the human, not as a problem, and proposes, with Xperienc's Global Language, that patient and doctor each speak their own language, in a clinical second opinion, not a medical report. The proposal is under development and is described in the chapter A whole body.

Read also: The sun is for everyone · Ecosystem

Sources

• IEEE Milestones, Grace Hopper's Compiler and Programming Language Work, 1952–1959: https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Milestone-Proposal:Grace_Hopper's_Compiler_and_Programming_Language_Work,_1952-1959
• Yale, biography of Grace Murray Hopper: https://president.yale.edu/biography-grace-murray-hopper
• IEEE Spectrum, "About Grace Hopper": https://spectrum.ieee.org/from-punch-cards-to-python/about-grace-hopper
• OCLC Newsletter, Mar./Apr. 1987, no. 167 (compiler quote): https://cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-wit.html
• Smithsonian, the "first bug" (1947): https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_334663