Grace Hopper Was Told Computers Couldn't Read WORDS, So She Proved Them Wrong

Experts swore computers could only crunch numbers. Grace Hopper taught them to understand words.

She was a math professor who left the classroom to join the Navy during World War II.

They assigned her to one of the first computers, a clattering giant called the Mark I.

When a moth jammed a later machine, her team taped it in the logbook as the first real bug.

She made the words "bug" and "debugging" part of how the world talks about code.

Back then, programming meant writing in raw numbers only a few people on Earth understood.

Hopper believed code could be written in plain English, and almost everyone said she was wrong.

So she built the first compiler, a program that translated human words into machine instructions.

That idea led to COBOL, the language that ran banks, governments, and the world for decades.

She retired a Navy rear admiral, the woman who taught machines to speak our language.

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