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Grace Hopper, a US Navy mathematician, helped move programming from raw machine code to languages written in English words, work that led to COBOL.

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Hopper joined the US Navy in 1943 and was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer. In 1952, at the company that built the UNIVAC, she completed A-0, an early compiler: a program that turns instructions written by people into the machine code a computer runs. Many colleagues believed computers could only do arithmetic, but she argued that programs could be written in English words, and her team's FLOW-MATIC language did exactly that. It became a main model for COBOL, a business language created in 1959 and still used by banks and governments. She retired from the Navy in 1986 as a rear admiral, aged 79, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom after her death, in 2016.

Türkçe oku
ABD Donanması'nda görev yapan matematikçi Grace Hopper, programlamayı ham makine kodundan İngilizce sözcüklerle yazılan dillere taşıyan öncülerden biriydi. Bu çalışmaların sonunda COBOL dili doğdu.

Hopper 1943'te ABD Donanması'na katıldı ve Harvard Mark I bilgisayarının ilk programcılarından biri oldu. 1952'de, UNIVAC bilgisayarını üreten şirkette çalışırken ilk derleyicilerden biri olan A-0'ı tamamladı. Derleyici, insanların yazdığı komutları bilgisayarın çalıştırabileceği makine koduna çeviren programdır. Pek çok meslektaşı bilgisayarların yalnızca aritmetik işlem yapabileceğine inanıyordu; Hopper ise programların İngilizce sözcüklerle yazılabileceğini savundu. Ekibinin geliştirdiği FLOW-MATIC dili de tam olarak bunu yaptı. Bu dil, 1959'da oluşturulan ve bankalarla devlet kurumlarında bugün hâlâ kullanılan iş dünyası dili COBOL'un başlıca örneği oldu. Hopper 1986'da, 79 yaşında tuğamiral olarak donanmadan emekli oldu; 2016'da ölümünden sonra Başkanlık Özgürlük Madalyası'na layık görüldü.

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Background reading: Grace Hopper
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