Great Women in Science - Grace Hopper

From now on, till I run out of ideas, I want to do short pieces on-air about great women scientists. Last week I talked about Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood babe, and co-inventor of frequency-hopping radio, an idea now behind mobile phone communication (CDMA). Clever and beautiful.

Tomorrow I'm going to present (admiral) Grace Hopper, the inventor of the COBOL programming language. Here, she is described as ...one of the first software engineers and, indeed, one of the most incisive strategic "futurists" in the world of computing.

Many of those of us who toiled under the yoke of COBOL may not be sure we want to thank her, but it was the mainstay of business computing for decades, and is remains the core of many systems, even today.

But Edsger Dijkstra wasn't impressed. He famously said The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense.

And guess what! Her team is credited with finding the first ever computer bug! Or, at least with first use of that term. I think the notebook where this was recorded is now in the Smithsonian Institute.

Technorati tags: Science, Education, Community, Radio, Canberra, Australia