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We, Programmers: A Chronicle of Coders from Ada to AI
book

We, Programmers: A Chronicle of Coders from Ada to AI

by Robert C. Martin
December 2024
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
10h 31m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from We, Programmers: A Chronicle of Coders from Ada to AI

4

Grace Hopper: The First Software Engineer

Grace Hopper entered our field at a time when programmers literally punched holes in paper tape—holes that corresponded to the numeric instructions that drove the computer to execute a procedure. She became quite skilled at this task, and gradually became aware that there was a better way.

That better way, which she called automatic programming, involved having a computer program determine the numeric instructions from a more abstract language that was more comfortable for the programmer. She wrote the first such program and called it a compiler.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Grace Hopper was the first “real” programmer. A few others had written programs before her, but it was Hopper who first ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780135344248