Grace Hopper
From Wikiquote
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (9 December 1906 – 1 January 1992) U.S. Naval officer, and an early computer programmer; developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language.
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- From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.
- On the removal of a 2-inch-long moth from the Harvard Mark I experimental computer at Harvard in August 1945, as quoted in Time (16 April 1984)
- To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.
- Sloan School of Management (1962). Management and the Computer of the Future, p. 277, Wiley.
- A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
- Tropp, Henry S. (Fall 1984). "Grace Hopper: The Youthful Teacher of Us All". Abacus 2 (1): p. 18. ISSN 0724-6722.
- It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
- As quoted in U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine (July 1986)
- I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?"
- On being the oldest active-duty officer in the U.S. military, in an interview on 60 Minutes (24 August 1986)
- In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, "Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me."
- At the end of about a week, I called back and said, "I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?"
- Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
- (March/April 1987). "The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper". OCLC Newsletter (167). ISSN 0163-898X.
- I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. […] they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.
- Billings, Charlene W. (1989). Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer, p. 74, Enslow. ISBN 089490194X.
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- I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.
- The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
- Possibly quoted in Computer Networks, 1st. ed (1981), by Andrew Tanenbaum, p. 168, without attribution.
- Explicitly attributed (without source) in The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (1994), by Simon Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassmann (editors), p. 9.
- The most dangerous phrase in the language is, "We've always done it this way."
- You manage things, you lead people.
[edit] Quote about Grace Hopper
- On COBOL: "But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!"

