Grace Hopper

1906–1992 · American computer scientist and United States Navy officer

Topics: software design, debugging, programming, engineering leadership

• We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

  — Grace Hopper

• The Group started out by trying to design a language for stating procedures, but soon discovered that what was really required was a description of the data and a statement of the relationships between the data sets.

  — Grace Hopper

• I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.

  — Grace Hopper

• There's something you learn in your first boot-camp, or training camp: If they put you down somewhere with nothing to do, go to sleep — you don't know when you'll get any more.

  — Grace Hopper

• You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.

  — Grace Hopper

• Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

  — Grace Hopper

• We must state relationships, not procedures.

  — Grace Hopper

• From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.

  — Grace Hopper

• We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data-processing situations the capability for describing data.

  — Grace Hopper