Jean Sammet passed away a little over a month ago. And while I bless the New York Times for dispelling a myth I've lived with for about two decades, I'm equally outraged that this was the first I'd heard of Ms. Sammet's work. When I re-booted my computer programming education in 1996, the curriculum included the COBOL programming language. (Gen-Y and older folks will remember the Y2K non-event, which was proceeded by a sharp demand for such, ahem, vintage languages as businesses threw money at decades of technical debt.)
COBOL was/is indelibly associated with Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper, who is largely responsible for the fact that "programming" no longer involves building software with tweezers, pushing ones and zeroes on and off stacks of memory-addresses. (Assembly-language is the closest you can get these days. I tried it once. Once. [shudder]) One of my teachers -- himself a PhD -- was immensely proud of having met her...and the fact that she, by that time a senior citizen, was exhausting to keep pace with.
But, as it turns out, "Amazing Grace" didn't design so much as a feature of the language. No question that her work was absolutely foundational to it (and, really, everything since). But, as Ms. Sammet's obituary points out, Hopper's "Mother of COBOL" moniker is entirely undeserved. (Hello, Halo Effect.) The actual credit belongs to Ms. Sammet and five other programmers who slammed out the design in two weeks. (In the days before Red Bull and foosball tables, if you can believe that!)
What I find interesting about this era in computing history is the sense of a battle for the soul of computer programming. Dr. Hopper's work was, at it base, driven by an abiding love of mathematics. She found the bit-twiddling a needless waste of a mathematician's time, and she bucked management to develop a more English-like grammar. (Woo, skunkworks project!)
In contrast, her fellow force-of-nature, Ms. Sammet, seemed more influenced by working for hardware manufacturers, absorbing the culture of calipers, slide-rules, etc. And it comes through in her view of software as the product of a more rigorous engineering process. (A view echoed during my stint at IBM in the early 2000s when "the process is the product.")
In the end, however, neither of these formidable ladies was entirely correct. Because software was quickly co-opted by business, where neither mathematical precision nor engineering rigour can stand up to the short-term profit motive...and the long-term tendency to kick the can down the road. Fittingly, the NYT obituary for Ms. Sammet concludes:
"COBOL was initially intended as a short-term solution to the problem of handling business data — a technology that might be useful for a year or two until something better came along. But it has lived on. More than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are now in use and an estimated 2 billion lines are added or changed each year, according to IBM Research."Apart from the term "bug" that has been Adm. Hopper's ubiquitous contribution to the programming lexicon, you'll sometimes see her quoted along the lines of, "The most dangerous phrase in the English language is, 'we've always done it that way.'" But there's also the (anonymous) adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." As programming languages go, "something better" has probably come along in the last fifty years. Just not "better enough" to justify tossing out the engineering that went into the original COBOL-flavoured solutions. And that in itself is one HECK of a memorial.
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* In case it matters, title is a riff on one of John Donne's poems.
