Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, Ret., on Ada

[Nyberg@ADA20.ISI.EDU (Karl Nyberg)]

Thought those of us involved in the Ada program might be interested in
the following bits of an interview.

-- Karl --

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InformationWEEK, March 9, 1987, pp 52-60
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	     Amazing Grace Hopper: Computing's First Lady

      [Ed. IW interviews Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (USNR-Ret.)]
			  by Diana ben-Aaron


IW: You were instrumental in making the Cobol language a standard.
What do you think of the Department of Defense's new language, Ada?

Hopper: Ada is for weapons systems.  People have got to realize that.
It's going to get to be like Jovial.  Everyone had his own version of
Jovial, everyone kept putting his own features in it.  That killed it,
and they are going to do the same to Ada.

It'll get like the B-52 bomber.  If you hang too many things on it, it
won't fly.  And that would be tragic, because we need Ada for those
mission-critical systems.  Ada isn't for data processing.  It's not
for doing payroll.  It's for those strings of ones and zeroes, for
real-time.

...

IW: How about operating systems?

Hopper: Eventually they'll be in the chips.  I don't know why they
don't put them in the chips.

IW: Are there any technologies that we have underexploited?

Hopper: Parallel processing.  You have the Hypercube, or you have the
Connection Machine, which has 64,000 processors, each working on part
of the problem.  That's not good for data processing.  It doesn't help
at all in data processing.

...

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