Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was an American computer scientist and a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, nicknamed "Amazing Grace." She believed computers shouldn't only speak in numbers — they should understand something closer to English — and she pretty much single-handedly made it happen.
Hopper wrote the first compiler, a program that translates human-readable instructions into
the machine code a computer runs. That idea led to COBOL, a language so readable that
ordinary businesses could use it — and huge amounts of the world's banking still runs on it
today. She also championed
In 1947, Hopper's team traced a glitch in a huge relay computer to an actual moth stuck in the machinery. They taped the moth into the logbook and noted they had "debugged" the computer — one of the most charming origin stories in tech. Hopper also handed out "nanoseconds": lengths of wire about 30 cm long, the distance light travels in a billionth of a second, so people could hold the idea of computer speed in their hands. Her motto: "It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission."