| That should be Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (phd). One of the first computer scientists. She coined the term "bug" for the moths that got into one of the first computers (UNIVAC).
Perhaps her best-known contribution to computing was the invention of the compiler, the intermediate program that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. She did this, she said, because she was lazy and hoped that "the programmer may return to being a mathematician." Her work embodied or foreshadowed enormous numbers of developments that are now the bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code optimization, and even symbolic manipulation of the kind embodied in Mathematica and Maple.
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"Do not forget your dogs of war, your big guns, which are the most-to-be respected arguments of the rights of kings."
- Frederick the Great, King of Prussia  |