While I appreciate all the tributes to Rear Admiral Hopper on what would have been her 107th birthday, I'm disappointed in the superficiality of most of them. Usually they mention her naval career and COBOL, but that's about it. She was actually quite a bit more than that.
Before WWII, she earned a PHD in Mathematics from Yale and became a faculty member at Vassar.
During the war, she joined the Naval Reserves and found herself assigned to work at Harvard on the Mark I, where she became one of the first programmers.
After the war, she wished to remain in the Navy, but they declined because she was too old (38). She remained at Harvard until 1949, when she joined the team developing the UNIVAC I. It was while she was there that she developed the concepts of higher level languages and compilers (the first actual compiler was developed by Hopper, 1952.)
She returned to active duty with the Navy in the 60s, and retired and unretired several times until her final retirement in 1986. She was a strong advocate in the Navy for a move to smaller, distributed, networked computers instead of large centralized ones.
Her career spanned academic, commercial and military worlds, and she was very accomplished in all of them. Just referring to her involvement in COBOL isn't giving her nearly enough credit.
And I think she really liked being in the Navy.
