Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Grace Hopper!

Dave Horsfall scripsit: Well, no. The moth incident happened in 1947, and the OED lists the word "debugging" as first appearing in print in 1945 in a British journal. Hopper may or may not have known that: certainly she was consciously punning on the existing word "bug", which went right back to Edison's laboratory and first appeared in print (per the OED) in 1889. I know it too, and there is nothing blameworthy about it. We wouldn't get far nowadays without records, and they first appeared in Cobol (or rather its direct ancestor Flow-Matic) in 1959, more than a decade before any other programming language had them. Longer, if you accept that PL/I would not have taken the shape it did if Cobol had not existed. Yes, Cobol is clunky and archaic; lots of people think Lisp is archaic too. But it met a need at a particular time, and very successfully so. The pseudo-readability was meant, at least by Hopper herself, to help customers rather than managers understand the code. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to [Sam], a grey-clad moving hill. Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes, but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are but memories of his girth and his majesty. --"Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit"