Mother of compilers

This blog is about one of the most important women in computer science, her name was Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (AKA Amazing Grace). She is considered as a key element in computer science investigation because she was one of history's first computer programmers and also known as "the mother of compilers" because she built the first compiler ever. This is widely acknowledged cause as we know, building a compiler is a lot of work 

Dr. Grace's als0 developed FLOW-MATIC and is the first English-like data processing language. This language makes it easier to build a compiler for another programming language o the root of programming languages tree, is the compiler that Grace built.

Almost everything she made is an achievement and well if we think of the industry where she belonged, military and computer science, one can only imagine the difficulties that she faced into trying to fulfill her dreams and goals. Both industries were ruled by men and sexism. Therefore, we could even say that she paved the way for women to work in those fields, and as an example to many other women that you can triumph and make history.

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This book was part of an initiative our teacher follows which attempts to make us read more novels and casual reading. The book titled  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy  is written by Douglas Adams and although it wasn't my first time reading it, I was really happy of reading it again., first of all it is a great book, with a great story which I really liked and best of all it is not a very long book, which made it easier to read and in general a great book to read. Avoiding spoilers, the story is about a man and his "human" friend travelling to the galaxy with a guide, titled the same way as the book. This guide explains the characteristics of species, planets, galaxy and during the pass of the story, you are meeting new characters and many "strange" events that in some cases there is no sense in them but they are fun for some reason, and remember, 42 is the answer of everything.  I would certainly recommend first of, buying this book, it's no...
Leer más

Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (Most Likely) Never Design a Compiler

This article may have a really long title, but it explicitly invites you to read it, without having to go through too much stuff. "Making compiler design relevant for students who will (most likely) never design a compiler" is the title for an article written by Saumya Debray. I think this is one of the hardest classes for people in my major, not because it is misunderstood. Everybody gets the idea that they're going to built a somewhat version of a compiler, and that sound like a hard thing to do, therefore, they're prepared for that, and think is way too hard. Compiler design goes beyond a simple or advanced compiler. Compiler have to take a buch of code, and pretty much tell a computer to understand it. How do we make it efficient? Where should we throw exceptions? Why does a programming language behave certain ways. This questions are why compiler design should be relevant to anyone using a compiler for their language; basically, any developer. Lastly, there a...
Leer más

Technical Overview of the CLR

This last entry based on the article titled Technical Overview of the Common Language Runtime  written by Erik Meijer and Jim Miller. Basically what the authors do here is a comparison between Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The CLR is basically a platform-independent development system which enables programs from different programming languages to be run on different types of hardware and it is composed by the Common Tape System and the Common Language Specification, after being written the applications written in CLR are compiled into Intermediate language and finally compiled into the hardware in which you want to run the code by the Common Language Runtime. In contrast, the JVM is an environment that is used to execute Java Programs, these programs are compiled into bytecode and then ran on any platform that has JVM installed. But, which one is better? And the answer is CLR, even though these two platforms are interesting and have...
Leer más