Igor Delovski Board

[Ike]

Slashdot: 100 Years of Grace Hopper

"Grab your COBOL Coding Forms and head on over to comp.lang.cobol,
kids! Yesterday was Grace Hopper's 100th birthday, and many are still
singing the praises of her Common Business-Oriented Language."

[Ike]

The First Computer Debug Bug



"On the 9th of September, 1945, when the machine was experiencing
problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between
the points of Relay #70, in Panel F."

[Ike]

Wiki: Grace Hopper



"Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992)
was an American computer scientist and naval officer. A pioneer in the field,
she was the first programmer of the Mark I Calculator and developed
the first compiler for a computer programming language. ... However, it
was her idea that programs could be written in a language that was close
to English rather than in machine code ..."

[Ike]

nytimes: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

"In 1953, frustrated by his experience of 'hand-to-hand combat with
the machine,' Mr. Backus was eager to somehow simplify programming.
He wrote a brief note to his superior, asking to be allowed to head a
research project with that goal. 'I figured there had to be a better way,'
he said."



wiki: "He later worked on a "function-level" programming language known as
FP which was described in his Turing Award lecture Can Programming be
Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"

[delovski]

JoS: John Backus, developer of FORTRAN, passes away at 82

"While reading the slashdot comments on his passing, I ran across this incredible
paper from Backus written in *1978*:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf

Basically he describes many of the bottlenecks that we are running into with
imperative languages"

[delovski]

Tux Deluxe: Konrad Zuse - Turing's Alter Ego?

"The inventor of both the first programming language and the first stored-
program computer was the German engineer, artist and entrepreneur, Konrad
Zuse (1910-1985). Virtually unknown outside his own country until the late
1940s, he almost single-handedly pioneered the stored-program von Neumann
architecture, predating Neumann et al by 9 years."

[Ike]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgTFi2vINV4&t=240

Grace Hopper segment on 60 minutes