
Today's Google Doodle: Grace Hopper - sheetjs
https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2013/grace-hoppers-107th-birthday-5447077240766464.3-hp.gif
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DanielRibeiro
Grace Hopper on Nanoseconds:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8)

~~~
sheetjs
Her appearance on Letterman was impressive. Relevant part:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ#t=304](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ#t=304)

~~~
tuzemec
Wow... amazing person!

~~~
philbarr
Yes! I particularly liked:

"So you worked on the first ever computer in the U.S.?"

"Yes."

"And how did you know so much about computers back then?"

"I didn't. It was the first one."

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JonnieCache
Hands up who was expecting some kind of univac emulator in javascript?

Still, a nice bit of pixel art.

~~~
tagabek
I think they found a nice balance between honoring her life and creating
something that is pleasing to look at.

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lotsofcows
Ha, glad they included the "bug".

~~~
callum85
Thanks, I missed that

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mentos
My first C++ book, 'A Computer Science Tapestry', had a page dedicated to her
that has stuck with me since I read it in highschool.

Grace Hopper "was a proponent of innovative thinking and kept a clock on her
desk that ran counterclockwise to show that things could be done differently.
Although very proud of her career in the Navy, Hopper had little tolerance for
bureaucracies, saying:

It’s better to show that something can be done and apologize for not asking
permission, than to try to persuade the powers that be at the beginning.”

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njharman
The reason I became a programmer. Grace -> COBOL -> My father -> Me. In the
basement, pecking away at tiny green monochrome screen and loading 8" floppy
drives on Cromemco Systems-3, COBOL was the first language I tried to learn,
wee age of 12. Although, honestly I don't think I ever grokked it as much as
the simpler language put forth in thy little white book on my father's
bookshelf by fellows K&R.

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ibrow
Slightly off topic, but has anyone read "Grace Hopper and the Invention of the
Information Age"[1]? It's been on my wishlist for ages, but I've not got round
to buying/reading it yet.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invention-Information-Lemelson-
Studi...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invention-Information-Lemelson-Studies-
Innovation/dp/0262517264)

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brandonbloom
Hot-linking to the gif omits the caption:

"Be a maker, a creator, an innovator. Get started now with an Hour of Code."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5FbmsH4fw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5FbmsH4fw)

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jason_slack
The mother of all Grace Hopper biographies (very long):

[http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm](http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm)

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peter303
She was back from the era when most computer programmers were female. Until
late 1940s, the word "computer" meant a clerk who used did long clculations by
hand or adding machine. These were mainly mathematical tables or military
operations. Some of these women transitioned into programing jobs when the
first programmable digital computers began in the late 1940s. Programming was
either switchboard rewiring or punch cards/tape then.

~~~
detcader
Then the men realized there was money in it...

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hatu
If you just subtract the birth year from the current year, you would have a
birthday every day.

~~~
jbrooksuk
That's true, and I'm sure they're well aware of the maths, but doing it this
way makes it really simple for people who aren't programmers to understand
what is going on.

~~~
Zenst
Also demostrates how easy COBOL is, once you move past the stigma of it not
being flavour of the month.

As an educated guess I'd say it is also the longest serving programming
language still in use today, but I'm sure somebody with a weaving loom would
argue that.

~~~
shantnu
Really? I didn't know it was Cobol. Looked a bit SQL'ly to me :)

But yeah, it does look easy to read

~~~
moron4hire
COBOL predates SQL by about 15 years. In the 60s and early 70s, there was a
school of thought that programming languages could be made more like written
languages, and that this would make it easier for the programmer to reason
about programs, especially in the business context where companies were
starving for programmers, companies who saw the university system as focusing
too narrowly on academic theory. We get BASIC in the interim between COBOL and
SQL as well. COBOL, BASIC, and SQL were all designed with non-Computer
Scientists in mind, for "practical" applications.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
> more like written languages, and that this would make it easier for the
> programmer to reason about programs,

It's also said that it was intended to help non-programmers:

1\. Help managers better understand what the heck their employees were doing.

2\. Enable other non-technical stakeholders to participate in reviewing the
business logic.

As you can imagine that didn't actually help very much.

(I've heard people express similar skepticism about natural language testing
frameworks, although I don't know if that's fair or not.)

~~~
moron4hire
At the very least, I think it's an unnecessary context-switch. Why introduce
yet another language in your toolchain? The boss isn't going to be able to
understand the natural language tests, because s/he will be introducing their
own assumptions to the ambiguous nature of human language. Like how non-
programmers tend to use "or" to mean "exclusive-or". Or the plethora of issues
that come up when assuming N-based indexing when you actually have (1 -
N)-based indexing (for values of N that are either 0 or 1).

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rikkus
SUBTRACT BirthYear FROM CurrentYear GIVING Age

Isn't that off-by-one, for half the year (on average)?

~~~
delinka
If you're born on January 1, you get the right answer all year long. If you're
born on December 31, you get a new value on New Year's day and it'll be wrong
all year.

EDIT: After re-reading you, yes, it's off-by-one for someone in the population
for half the year on average.

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jason_slack
In the vein of the Letterman clip. I also saw this talk she gave:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ra2kt1Mpg8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ra2kt1Mpg8)

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goromlagche
mother of debugging. should have worked on that.

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Zyng
Is the bug in that code snippet intentional?

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veim32
Cute, but please fix your massive privacy and data violations before pissing
about with "Doodles".

I will not be fooled into trusting Google without massive transparency changes
to how they operate.

~~~
cromwellian
Your whole comment is off topic for this thread. There are numerous other
threads on HN dealing with NSA snooping that you can troll in.

~~~
veim32
Drawing attention to massive privacy violations is not irrelevant whenever
Google are mentioned. We should not be forgetting who we're dealing with.

If you were thinking of visiting North Korea for a holiday would it be "off
topic" to mention human rights issues?

~~~
jspc
Nobody give this person any more coffee

~~~
tripzilch
> Nobody give this person any more coffee

.. not quite a human rights violation, but man, that's pretty harsh.

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maxst
Ah google, still using GIFs in 2013... can't use APNG because it's "not
invented here".

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arrrg
Why should they use APNG? It's an unnecessary complication with no benefits
for the aesthetics they are going for.

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maxst
This doodle as GIF: 97 864 bytes Converted into APNG: 77 472 bytes

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shawabawa3
Browser share that supports APNG: ~25%

Browser share that supports GIF: ~99.9%

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maxst
Google is not just posting doodles on the front page. Last time I heard they
also have a browser. So they can shift those percentages, and by helping APNG,
they can help themselves: their front-page will load faster. It's a win-win.

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arrrg
Chrome probably should support APNG. But I'm not sure it would be wise to use
APNG even if Chrome did support it.

~~~
maxst
This site doesn't seem to have any problems serving better-looking APNGs for
Firefox users, and plain old GIFs to all others: [http://www.rw-
designer.com/cursor-set/icq-flower](http://www.rw-designer.com/cursor-set/icq-
flower)

