http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/09/iwd_grace_hopper/
One time, I'm not sure of the date--probably in the 70s or early
80s, I had the opportunity to hear a talk/lecture/presentation by
Grace Murray Hopper. I've never forgotten it. She was one of a
kind.
Among other things, she was instrumental in the development of
Cobol. Most programmers today sneer at it, but as the article
says:
"COBOL was one of the most successful computer languages
and is still in use today. Research
by Datamonitor found that in 2008 there were between 1.5 and
2 million developers still working with the 50-year-old
programming language, adding five billion lines of code to the 200
billion already running on live systems."
BTW, I'm not now and never was a COBOL programmer (FORTRAN, another
sneer-able language, was my bag.)
Mark Jarvis
(ancient geek)