On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 15:42:31 -0600, John McKown wrote: >https://medium.com/a-computer-of-ones-own/jean-sammet-designer-of-cobol-77c6d794365c > >No mention of Grace Hopper. Heresy?
I see the wikipedia article on her mentions cobol, and the article on cobol article mentions her. I also found an obituary of her https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/pioneering-software-engineer-and-cobol-co-designer-1.3111332 that includes this: <quote> Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer at Sperry Rand in the late 1950s, led the effort to bring computer makers together to collaborate on the new programming language. Hopper is often called the “mother of Cobol,” but she was not one of the six people, including Sammet, who designed the language – a fact Sammet rarely failed to point out. (Sammet worked for Sylvania Electric at the time.) “I yield to no one in my admiration for Grace,” she said. “But she was not the mother, creator or developer of Cobol.” Sammet and the other five programmers did much of the new language’s design during two weeks of nearly round-the-clock work, holed up in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan. Their proposal was presented in November 1959 and accepted with few changes by the computer makers they worked for and the Pentagon. As it evolved, Sammet pushed to inject more engineering discipline into the language to make it more useful and reliable in industries such as banking, health care and retailing, and for government agencies. </quote> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
