Grace Hopper Quotes

The most dangerous phrase in the language is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.

"Leadership is a two-way street, loyalty up and loyalty down."

(CBS 60 Minutes interview, March 6, 1983)

This saying has been in print already 1957, in Gerald Kershs "Fowler's End", p. 23.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data-processing situations the capability for describing data. We must also include a mechanism for determining the priorities to be applied to the data. These priorities are not fixed and are indicated in many cases by the data. Thus we must have a language and a structure that will take care of the data descriptions and priorities, as well as the operations we wish to perform. If we think seriously about these problems, we find that we cannot work with procedures alone, since they are sequential. We need to define the problem instead of the procedures. The Language Structures Group of the Codasyl Committee has been studying the structure of languages that can be used to describe data-processing problems. The Group started out by trying to design a language for stating procedures, but soon discovered that what was really required was a description of the data and a statement of the relationships between the data sets. The Group has since begun writing an algebra of processes, the background for a theory of data processing. Clearly, we must break away from the sequential and not limit the computers. We must state definitions and provide for priorities and descriptions of data. We must state relationships, not procedures.

It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy.

The most dangerous phrase in the language is we've always done

From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.

I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.