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In the 1950s, when computers were so large they filled entire rooms, women were often the ones programming them. It was considered tedious work, and therefore women’s work—as though anything requiring intellect was the reserve of men.

Grace Hopper, however, put paid to that notion several times over in her career.

Admiral Hopper—she fought tooth and nail to fulfil her childhood dream of joining the navy despite her size being deemed “too diminutive”—wasn't around to be given busywork. With a PhD in mathematics and the rare gift of a mind suited to both engineering and communication, she cut straight to the point and saw an opportunity to transform the process of programming itself.

When Hopper started working on the in 1949, the only way to write a program was in symbolic machine code, laborious and unintuitive.

Hopper thought it would be easier if programmers could just write English statements—why not let the computer translate the statements into machine code? “No-one thought of that earlier,” she quipped, “because they weren't as lazy as I was.”

Hopper’s thinking was, if programming languages were designed to better suit the human mind, this would make coding accessible to a much wider group of people.

Little did she know how far the impact of this thinking would extend.

Two women, Ester Gerston and Gloria Gordon Bolotsky, programming the ENIAC computer in 1946 ()

The Queen of Software

Hopper’s work on the world’s first word-based programming language, FLOW-MATIC, soon led her to develop COBOL (still in use today), as well as the first compilers to translate these into machine-readable code. This signified a tectonic shift for the field of computing and, later in life, earned Hopper the nickname “Grandma COBOL”.

Hopper’s compiler meant computer programs could now be written independently of the machines they were used on. This established the distinction between “software” and “hardware”, and earned Hopper another nickname, the “Queen of Software”.

Just as she intended, this programming language broadened the community of people who could code. Enthusiastic early adopters started sending her new chunks of code, which she then incorporated into further releases—the first example of open-source software.

Grace Hopper at the console of the UNIVAC, c. 1960 showing her colleagues how it's done ()

An endlessly growing tree

In computer programming, a function is a piece of code that takes an input and returns an output.

A recursive function is a particularly powerful type of function: it is a function that can call itself from within its own code, spawning new instances of itself that you could imagine extending outwards like the branches of a tree. From each branch grow two new ones, from each of these grow another two, and so on ad infinitum (that is, if you forget to include an exit clause in your code!).

Like a program initiating an infinite recursion, Admiral Hopper had set something unstoppable in motion.

As more people from different walks of life found their way into programming thanks to the availability of increasingly user-friendly languages, some of these people went on to develop yet more user-friendly languages, which in turn, are themselves ever widening the pool of who can code.

People like Felienne Hermans, who created , a language designed to help children learn to code. Rather than everyone having to use English keywords (like “if/then” or “for each”), Hedy offers users 70 different languages (with more continuously added thanks to open-source contributors).

Or like Lauren Lee McCarthy, who created , a JavaScript-based tool for making interactive digital art that “prioritises accessibility, inclusivity, community, and joy.”

As these tools keep opening doors for ever more diverse users, further transformative advances in the accessibility of tech are bound to emerge. The seed Grace Hopper planted is now an endlessly growing tree, one that keeps bearing fruit.

Grace Hopper, aka "Grandma COBOL" in a computer room in 1978 ()