Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper

An American computer scientist and US Navy rear admiral who developed the first compiler, a program that translates human-readable code into machine instructions, and was instrumental in developing COBOL, one of the earliest high-level programming languages. Hopper's insistence that programming languages should read more like English than machine code opened computing to far more people, and the compiler concept she pioneered underlies every layer of software, including the tools used to build symbolic AI systems. (See also: Symbolic AI)