Amazing Grace

     For decades now, the worlds of business and education have agreed: Coding is the skill of the future. Computer tech is where it's at. Software has eaten the world, and if you learn how to write it well, you can write your own ticket.
     Thus it's easy to find -- both online and off -- plenty of classes that promise to teach you the latest hot computer languages. Well, surprise! The most urgent demand right now is for a language launched in 1959, mainly by this lady.

Art by Woke Giant

     Meet Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. Not only did she rise very high in the U.S. Navy despite rampant sexism, she had a massive influence on the development of computer science. During WW II, Hopper worked on the team that ran the Harvard Mark 1, a massive early supercomputer that aided the Manhattan Project. After the war she worked on the first general computer designed for business, the UNIVAC. (Those who argue that women are genetically unsuited to math/tech work need a history lesson.)
     Hopper became convinced that computer languages should resemble plain English as much as possible. It can't be done, her colleagues said; computers don't speak English. So she helped develop a compiler -- a program that translates words into code that computers comprehend -- and thus we got COBOL, or COmmon Business-Oriented Language. COBOL was widely adopted, and these days it's hard to find a computer language that doesn't try to resemble plain English.
     Among the entities that adoped COBOL were state governments. At least a dozen (including Connecticut!) still use it to process unemployment claims...and that's bad news right now, when unemployment offices are being crushed as millions of people are trying to file for aid every week, and very few people know how to code in COBOL anymore.
      Grace Hopper had no love for the phrase "We've always done it this way." No doubt she would have shaken her head at government offices that went decades without upgrading their software. If you can write the language she shaped, your country needs you!
     In the meantime, here's the admiral charming the hell out of a very respectful David Letterman.