It's Late at Night Before I Dare to Tell You These 3 Little Secrets About Programmers

Secret 1: The word "computer" has nothing to do with men.

When the word "Computer" first appeared, it did not mean computer. On May 2, 1892, the New York Times had a job advertisement that read: Recruiting Computer, female, the subjects to be tested include: algebra, geometry, trigonometry and astronomy. This was a job advertisement issued by Harvard University astronomer Pickering. At that time, Computer specifically referred to people who were engaged in complex mathematical calculations.

Most of the people doing this kind of work are women, because women are more focused and careful. He recruited some deaf and mute women, whose specific job was to measure and classify the photographic negatives taken by the observatory, which was actually doing the work of today's computers by manual calculation, so they were also called Harvard computers. Of course, strictly speaking, they were not programmers, but people who did mechanical, repetitive and important computing work. But until the 1960s, even with the changes and development of technology, computers were always considered to be exclusive jobs for women, while hardware-related jobs were mainly done by men.

In 1967, Cosmopolitan magazine published an article titled "The Computer Girls", which mainly expressed the view that it is natural and advantageous for women to engage in computer programming. It mentioned that "now that the dazzling big computers have come, there is also a new profession for women: "programming"

Secret 2: The first bug in history was discovered by a programmer

Bug means stink bug in English because the first bug was actually a physical bug. In 1947, Grace Hopper worked in a laboratory at Harvard and was one of the first programmers of Harvard Mark I, one of the earliest computers. At that time, MARK1 contained more than 3,000 relays, more than 2,000 storage counters, and tens of thousands of wiring terminals. During a malfunction, Grace found that a moth had flown into a relay, causing the entire computer to stop working. She carefully clipped the moth out with tweezers and posted it in the notebook with the label "First actual case of bug being found".

When she was programming the Mark series of computers, Grace already felt the fear of being dominated by machine language. That’s why she wanted to design a program that allows people to program directly in a language that humans can understand, and then the program can translate the language into machine code and hand it over to the computer for execution. This is the principle of what we now call a compiler. In addition, this famous female commodore of the US Navy is also the designer of the COBOL language. Therefore, there are quite a few programmers among test engineers because they have a strong talent for debugging.

Secret 3: Today’s programmers write apps, but in the past, programmers developed atomic bombs

War has always been an important opportunity to promote the development of scientific research. Whether it is radio, aerospace technology or various weapons, they all rely on the abundant scientific research investment of various countries during the war. During World War II, the US Army launched a top-secret "Aberdeen Proving Ground" operation at the University of Pennsylvania due to the lack of mathematicians to calculate ballistic launch trajectories. This operation is to recruit women to calculate ballistic trajectories. Their specific job is to calculate a large amount of data so that soldiers can aim at targets and help scientists develop atomic bombs. Hundreds of women participated in this operation. After the end of World War II, the best of these female programmers continued to write a large number of programs for the world's first computer ENIAC.