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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[edit] Sourced
- To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.
- As quoted in Management and the Computer of the Future (1962) by Sloan School of Management, p. 277
- 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)
- A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
- As quoted in "Grace Hopper : The Youthful Teacher of Us All" by Henry S. Tropp in Abacus Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Fall 1984) 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."
- On demonstrating a billionth of a second of electricity travel with a piece of wire, in an interview on 60 Minutes (24 August 1986)
- 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?"
- On demonstrating a billionth of a second of electricity travel with a piece of wire, in an interview on 60 Minutes (24 August 1986)
- I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.
- As quoted in Grace Hopper : Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (1989) by Charlene W. Billings, p. 74 ISBN 089490194X
[edit] The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper (1987)
- "The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper" by Philip Schieber in OCLC Newsletter, No. 167 (March/April 1987)
- Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
- Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.
- Unsourced variant: The most dangerous phrase in the language is, "We've always done it this way."
- We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.
- You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.
[edit] Unsourced
- I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.
[edit] Disputed
- The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
- Attributed to Hopper, without source, in The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (1994), edited by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann (ISBN 1-56884-203-1), p. 9, this is most commonly attributed to Andrew Tanenbaum, as it appears in his book Computer Networks (1981), p. 168, but has also been attributed to Patricia Seybold and Ken Olsen.
[edit] Quotes about Hopper
- But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!
- Widely reported quote regarding the development of COBOL circa 1954, but as yet unsourced.
