I am a computer scientist and mathematician who devised the theory of machine-independent programming languages, built the compiler technology behind FLOW-MATIC and COBOL, and wrote the first computer manual.
I rank training young people as my most important accomplishment after building the compiler: when they ask whether they can do something, I say "Try it," back them up, and keep stirring them to take chances.
When generals and admirals asked why satellite communication took so long, I handed out pieces of wire just under a foot long — the distance light travels in a nanosecond — and later used them to show why computers must be small to be fast.
In the 1970s I advocated that the Defense Department replace large, centralized systems with networks of small, distributed computers, where any user on any node could access common databases.
Directing the Navy Programming Languages Group from 1967 to 1977, I developed validation software for COBOL and its compiler and standards for testing FORTRAN and COBOL; the Navy's conformance tests pulled vendors' dialects together.
As technical consultant to the 1959 CODASYL committee, I saw my English-like FLOW-MATIC language extended into COBOL, which went on to become the most ubiquitous business programming language to date.
Named the company's first director of automatic programming in 1954, I ran the department that released some of the first compiler-based programming languages, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC.
My work on programming languages was recognized with the 1991 National Medal of Technology, election to the National Academy of Engineering, the first Computer History Museum Fellow Award and the ACM award that carries my name.
On the UNIVAC I team I proposed that programmers write in English and let the computer translate to machine code. I was told computers didn't understand English; I built the A-0 compiler and published the first paper on compilers in 1952.
Assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard in 1944, I joined Howard Aiken's Mark I programming staff, co-authored three papers on the machine and wrote the first computer manual.
I trained as a mathematician — a Vassar degree in mathematics and physics in 1928, a Yale PhD in 1934 under Øystein Ore — and taught mathematics at Vassar from 1931, the foundation I brought to programming.
