100 Years of Grace Hopper

theodp writes "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."

COBL Coding Form slashdotted

[davidwr]

Try this [archive.org] instead.

It's easier to ask forgiveness...

[ishmalius]

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

Didn't know that she said that.

I have been quoting this for years. This is precisely the way to deal with any bureaucracy. Asking for permission is the most ridiculous thing to do when wanting to get something done. You are condemning yourself to days and weeks of memos, email, meetings, and PowerPoint charts. Better to just do it and get it done. Cut that Gordian knot. What a useful method of dealing with middle management.

I just didn't know that she was the one who said it first.

Re:COBOL, LISP, FORTRAN

[Kjella]

Be sure to pay homage to the inventors of the other two ur-languages; Alan Backus, and John McCarthy. Without them, we'd still be programming in assembler, and there probably would be only a world-wide market for 5 computers.

First of all, it's John W. Backus not Alan Backus. On the timeline here, the "5 computers" prediction was made by an IBM chairman in 1943. Even long before there was computer languages as such (Fortran 1957, Lisp 1958, COBOL 1959), there was orders of magnitude more than 5 computers. Nor did assembler die with rise of computer languages, it went on for decades and games like Transport Tycoon (1994) and Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999) were written pretty much entirely in assembler though I assume the macros must have started to look like a language of their own. So while all credit where credit is due, giving them the credit for there being more than 5 computers is way too much.