Mother of Compilers

The article and the video are about the Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, who is known as the “mother of COBOL”, and some of the most important events of her life and their contributions to the IT field. Even when the history of computer hardware is as the article says mostly male-oriented, the contribution of Mrs. Grace to this field can be comparable to the contributions of other IT revolutionaries. I didn’t know who Mrs. Grace was, it is true that I did not know how much she contributed compared to the contributions of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Alan Turing. Also, I did not know that the first programmer was Ada Lovelace.

It is interesting that she disassembled clocks in order to know how it works, also funny to know that she ended up disassembling another six clocks, it reminds me when we “disassemble” code to know how it works. It is also impressive that she studied math, physic and engineering at the Vassar College at New York and earned a master and a doctorate in math and mathematical physics. The surprises continue, I know the story about how the term “bug” was invented, but I did not know that was her and her team whom invented it.

Finally, other of the import events of her life was their inventions, the construction of the Mark I, an electro-mechanical computer, the competition of the UNIVAC and the programming of the BINAC, which was a binary machine build for the Snark Missile project. The write of the A-0 compiler and finally the develop of COBOL. She has earned multiple awards, I feel bad, because I really did not know anything about her and her contributions, even when are important part of the main story of the software. I hope to read more articles about her, and maybe about the develop of the A and B compilers

Internals of GCC

The podcast was interesting, I think I’ve not used the gcc until I started my career, but I remember when I was younger, sometimes I watched my uncle (who also studied computer systems engineer) use it (I didn’t know what it was) and it was something incredible for me. Don’t misunderstand me, I used to think that it was something very complex and it scared me, because as a child all what I used to do with a computer involved a GUI. Nowadays I don’t know all about it, and who can? But its interesting to know about it, because it makes me feel that this can help us to get a little bit closer to the “heart” of a computer and what makes it works as we know. 

The podcast talks about the three parts of compilers, the front, middle and back. Each layer works for its own and is isolated from their neighbors, but they can communicate between them in order to make possible the compilation process. Also, the podcast explains why this process is important to give the programs the “ability” to be portable and don’t be constrained by the hardware. This, as we know, to allow developers produce software without being worried about the compatibility of their product with other architectures (in most cases)

Finally, the podcast remarks that maybe we don’t need to know how a compiler works, and that’s something that we have listened before (as at the title of the previous article that we readed “Making Compiler Design important …”). I think this is true, in most of the cases we really didn’t need to know how is the compiler designed or how it works “inside”, but as the previous article mentioned, maybe we can found something interesting and useful for other problems that we may face. Its something as the mechanic engineers knowing how works a fuel engine, but no how it’s designed and how they can make one.