Computer Science Rocks!

Some of the TA’s were missing last week. Why were they out? It wasn’t the Swine Flu; they were at the Grace Hopper Conference, a celebration of women in computing named in honor of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. Hopper is a distinguished computer scientist whose accomplishments were essential to computing and whose legacy has encouraged women to pursue careers in this underrepresented field.

It was Hopper’s idea that programing languages could be written closer to English text rather than machine code or a language close to machine code like Assembly. She developed the first compiler which made English-like languages possible. COBOL, a widely-used early language, was based on her code philosophy. Thanks to Hopper, you don’t have to write your programs in zeros and ones!

Here’s an example of how Hopper made coding easier.

Assembly:

li $a1, 2
li $a2, 3
add $a0, $a1, $a2

Java:

x = 2 + 3;

Click here for more information about Admiral Grace Murray Hopper or the Grace Hopper Conference.