Grace Hopper Lecture

Hard to believe there are 124 comments here and nobody has brought up Grace Hopper's talk01 yet. With good humour she gives a example of what various devices' latency are, and a simple tool to comprehend the cost and orders of magnitude. 0 short - link 1 long - link to this video

…d to us? That thing hit the fan. It was absolutely obvious, that a respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could not understand French or German. And I had to spend the next four months saying no, no, no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming it in anything but English. She starts the topic at around 59 minutes - link to this video edit - I just checked the dates. Never mind logical sense, the explanation fails chronological sense. Her demo was in 1952 and she became the very first director of Eckert–Mauchly's newly formed Department of Automatic Programming, sometime in 1954. They definitely were not worried about time and energy bei…

> Light is slow, not exactly 1 foot per nanosecond but it's a reasonable mnemonic. "Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond" is a good illustration of this (segment is only 2m): * link * link Full lecture: * link to this video

…of explanations. Alas, a rarefied genre, because it is so much harder to do well (without doing disservice to the learner's intellect and ability) than expert talking to (presumed) expert. So thanks for contributing to it. People like George Polya 0, Richard Feynman 1, Grace Hopper 2 are exemplars of this tradition. 0 link 1 link 2 link to this video (And I too try in my own meagre way through my blog and source code, albeit it's all plain text because visual explainers, animated ones that too are ridiculously difficult. So I have some idea of how much of a labour of love your piece is. <Claps hands, Whistles, Doffs hat>.)…