Grace Hopper

But there's something that has to fill in that gap, that representation of the formal behavior of the system.

Grace Hopper faced similar kinds of complaints as she was moving the creation of compilers.

Compilers represent a level of abstraction up from the machine language to a higher order language.

And the complaints then were it would never be fast enough, it never gives good enough code.

Question nine.

What word for fixing errors in computer code was popularized by Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper after a moth was found in a 1947 computer? And the answer is debugging.

Honestly, that moth is the only bug anyone's ever fixed on the first try.

Question 10.

Oh, she became the Navy Admiral before she retired.

Grace Hopper.

And So, you know, she was still working with relays and vacuum tubes.

And it's kind of like, okay, those people have no concept of our current level of integrated circuits.

Answering that question gets into much bigger philosophical debates, like what counts as a programming language? I'm sure that as soon as we have a frontrunner, some scrap of code will turn up in an archive that proves the theory wrong.

It's very likely that Rear Admiral Grace Hopper created the first language while crunching on a univac.

But again, we have to be careful.

Setting the concept of first aside, we come to something much more impactful.

So, in a very short time, he's working on three different machines.

I don't think it's wild to imagine that he was thinking, you know, this 701, it could use a few things from those old machines, it could use a few tweaks, and then it would be pretty good.

Some other automatic coding systems in this period took the same approach, notably the A series of compilers developed by Grace Hopper.

Here's the odd part, at least to my mind.

Yeah.

I also heard that the legendary Grace Hopper conference has been defunded and won't be happening this year.

But...

I know that when I bring this kind of thing up, I get a lot of people not really wanting to acknowledge, ready to understand that there's some sort of problem of woman representation in tech and what this might mean.

And I don't see a lot of really tangible action results.

I don't see evidence that this is being prioritized, right? I'm not going to try to come up with a whole list right now, but, you know, just one canary in the coal mine is, yeah, if we were...

If we were, as an industry, focusing on listening to women right now, we just wouldn't see the Grace Hopper Conference defunded.

No.

And that we could all be kind of elevated almost like they're like a magnet pulling us up, right? What we learn from them becomes like a magnet.

And I think the people in this book, I'm not going to be a computer pioneer like Grace Hopper or the exceptional CEO that Catherine Graham became or a scientist and nation builder the way Benjamin Franklin was.

But what you learn systematically across them becomes something that you learn from in the templates in a systematic way, and they can help pull us forward, even though I'll never be a Franklin or a Catherine Graham.

So that's one piece of it.

You found the big thing and you just go deeper, deeper, deeper to the end.

Two is what I would call a hedgehog theme that has multiple platforms and multiple careers within that theme.

So that would be like the computer scientist Grace Hopper, who was about making computers more useful and these incredible useful gadgets in the world through software, which she was on the first computer, the Mark I project at Harvard.

But she did it through multiple platforms.