Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) was a mathematician and US Navy officer who became one of the central figures in the early history of programming. In her Computer History Museum oral history, recorded with Angeline Pantages in December 1980, the catalog record summarizes that Hopper and her staff “developed A-O, the first compiler, followed by the first English-language compiler, B-O, or Flow-Matic, the major predecessor of COBOL.”
A compiler is a program that translates human-written instructions into the machine codes a computer can run. Hopper’s A-0 work, done while she was at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and later Sperry Rand’s Univac division, was an early step toward letting people write programs in something closer to readable statements rather than raw numeric codes.
Her conviction that programs should read more like English shaped FLOW-MATIC, which in turn fed directly into the design of COBOL, the business-oriented language standardized by the CODASYL committee. The same catalog record notes that she returned to Navy service to work on standardizing languages and software and remained involved with the CODASYL effort behind COBOL.
Hopper continued her Navy career for decades and was eventually promoted to rear admiral. She is also widely associated with the famous Harvard Mark II “bug” logbook entry of 1947, although the surviving record does not show that she personally found the moth; what she did, years later, was help make the story famous.