The mother of compilers.

I was aware of the important role that women played overall in the history and development of computer science and programming, but I did never imagine that also a woman played an essential part in the creation of compilers and the foundation of programming as we know it, being for someone other than a mathematician of a physicist.

I consider quite impressive that back in those days a concept that is so common and obvious to us as is that we do not need exclusively to be scientists in order to program and that programming should be possible to more people, and the fact that a computer is more than just a big calculator, was so strange to most of the computer science community. In this I admire Grace Hopper greatly, because she never stopped until she could prove to others that her ideas were right and made them view why was that and also changed the paradigm of computers in the process. I don’t think that she was the only person involved in that process, but without her courage and her stubbornness to prove all those ideals I believe that this change would have taken longer to be made.

Another thing I have never realized is the part that a compiler played in how we look at computers. Before Hopper and her team worked on the first compiler, computers were just used as gigantic calculators without acknowledging all the potential they still had to be exploited. And now I see that could not have been possible without the concept of a compiler. A compiler is what translates all those symbols that make sense to us into instructions to the computer, then a computer can manipulate those symbols it now understands in order to get the job done. It is now not just one calculator.

I think that as obvious and as essential this discovery is to us, it would have taken a while longer if Grace had not invested her strength, abilities and spirit to prove and make this work. She is not just an amazing woman but an amazing human being, as she used to think about it; and proves us that both men and women are capable of achieving the same greatness, not because of our gender but because we are human beings.