Did You Know...

Amazing Grace

Grace Hopper is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing software problems (AKA "bugs"). She once removed a moth from a computer to fix a computer glitch. It was said that the photo below shows the first ever "computer bug".

Grace Hopper, sometimes referred to as “Amazing Grace”, was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. When she earned her Ph.D. from Yale Univiersity, She was one of four women in a doctoral program of ten students. She invented the first compiler for a computer programming language and was a key designer of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.

One of her famous quotes is, "It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."

She also said, "You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people."

On her 107th Birthday, Google honored her with a doodle.

The First Computer

Many consider the ENIAC, built in 1946, to be the first digital computer since it was fully functional.

This is how it looks like...

Did you know that it weighed almost 50 tons and occupied about 1,800 square feet? Oh my! Today, a smart phone in your pocket can have more computational power.

Hello, World!

If you start to learn a new programming language, chances are you will see a"Hello, World!" program written in that language.

Where did this tradition come from?

In the seminal book The C Programming Language, the first example program is the following:

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

Because of its simplicity, the "Hello, World!" program has become popular since then to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language for a working program. Thus it is often the very first program people write when they are new to the language.