Grace Hopper

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.

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

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.

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 Simon Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann, 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.

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.