Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was a U.S. Navy rear admiral and computer scientist who did more than almost anyone to make computers usable by people rather than only by mathematicians. Working on the early UNIVAC, she built the first compiler — a program that translates human-readable instructions into machine code — at a time when the prevailing wisdom held that computers could only do arithmetic.

Her conviction that programs should be written in something closer to English led to the FLOW-MATIC language and, through it, to COBOL, which ran the world's business systems for decades. She popularized the term "debugging" (after a literal moth found in a relay) and spent her later years teaching that the most dangerous phrase in the language is "we've always done it this way." She is part of the history of programming.