Welcome to our collection of quotes by Grace Hopper. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.
Prior to joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. Hopper attempted to enlist in the Navy during World War II but was rejected because she was 34 years old. She instead joined the Navy Reserves. Hopper began her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark I team led by Howard H. Aiken. In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer. At Eckert–Mauchly she managed the development of one of the first COBOL compilers. She believed that a programming language based on English was possible. Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers. By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker (originally called a compiler), which was written for the A-0 System. During her wartime service, she co-authored three papers based on her work on the Harvard Mark 1.
In 1954, Eckert–Mauchly chose Hopper to lead their department for automatic programming, and she led the release of some of the first compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL consortium, which consulted Hopper to guide them in creating a machine-independent programming language. This led to the COBOL language, which was inspired by her idea of a language being based on English words. In 1966, she retired from the Naval Reserve, but in 1967 the Navy recalled her to active duty. She retired from the Navy in 1986 and found work as a consultant for the Digital Equipment Corporation, sharing her computing experiences.
The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC. During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. A college at Yale University was renamed in her honor. In 1991, she received the National Medal of Technology. On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down. Respect for one's superiors; care for one's crew.
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'
I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.
From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.
At any given moment, there is always a line representing what your boss will believe. If you step over it, you will not get your budget. Go as close to that line as you can.
Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be an entry which reads, Information; for in most cases, the information is more valuable than the hardware which processes it.
The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's simply larger than it needs to be. It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
We're just getting started. We're just beginning to meet what will be the future-we've got the Model T.
We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge.
If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you've just proven a natural law!
I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy.
I'm totally against women in combat, because we live in a culture and a society that imposes on every man the concept of women and children first...If you had a man and a woman trying to go through some dangerous woods, the man's instinct would be to protect the woman. Therefore you weaken the man.
If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but ...to build systems of computers and operate them in parallel.
Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down.
Respect for one's superiors; care for one's crew.
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.
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.
Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down.
Respect for one's superiors; care for one's crew.
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologise than it is to get permission.
I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, What are you?
No computer is ever going to ask a new, reasonable question. It takes trained people to do that.
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, 'What are you?'
