Who Is Amazing Grace, or a Lady Who Debugged a Computer [Comics]

IT Trends

Julia Kravchenko, Author

Oct 31, 2017

Do you like your laptop working smoothly? And all apps running faultlessly and responding quickly? Sure thing! But often we forget about people who stand behind all these technological advances.

One of the prominent figures in the sphere of computer science is Grace Hopper also known as Amazing Grace. Why did she get such nickname? Well, the list of her achievements is enormous!

Starting from her yearly childhood Grace was interested in gadgets, and finally, she invented her own – the first compiler in the world – in 1952. Grace strongly believed that English words could be used in coding and a machine would be able to “understand” it. So, compiler was a device that converted English-based code into machine code.

The idea of English-based programming language was so important to Grace that in 1959 she took part in CODASYL consortium and together they created COBOL, Common Business-Oriented Language. Later Grace got her second nickname – Grandma COBOL.

All developers know it perfectly well that when there is language and code, there are also bugs to fix. Grace Hopper contributed to debugging process too in a really surprising way. The thing was that the relay stopped working properly and the lady decided to see what the problem was. She discovered a moth that stuck in the relay and conducted “debugging” of the computer! Wanna see the first computer bug? You can find the famous moth in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.