• 4 months ago
Transcript
00:00Aphasia, order more pimple cream.
00:06Aphasia?
00:07Where is that thing?
00:10I was assembled in building number 4, Fabricon Factory, Guangzhou, China.
00:22How would you rate my response to your query?
00:26Again with this?
00:29I just think you could do a lot better.
00:34Dear Tim and Moby,
00:36I want to make video games one day, but coding is hard.
00:40Why can't I just tell the computer what to do?
00:43Sincerely, Samir.
00:45I hear you, Samir.
00:47Learning to code is like learning a foreign language.
00:51It takes a lot of practice to master new vocabulary and rules of grammar.
00:56But it has to be that way, because computers don't think like we do.
01:00We have to meet them halfway, and speak in a way they can understand.
01:06That's what code is, a kind of cross between human and computer language.
01:11It takes some time to learn, but it's nothing compared to the early days of computing.
01:16Back then, you had to plan your program as a series of mathematical commands,
01:20and then translate those into machine language,
01:23which might be a string of ones and zeros,
01:26or blocks of numbers and letters like these.
01:29These days, coding is a lot easier, thanks in no small part to the work of Grace Hopper.
01:35She was part of that first generation of machine language programmers.
01:39Most had degrees in math or engineering, and they used computers to handle busy work.
01:44Stuff like counting people for the census, and calculating the aerodynamics of an airplane.
01:50But Hopper knew they could do so much more than solve tedious equations.
01:55They just needed to be easier for people in other fields to use.
01:59Computers had to be taught to be more... human.
02:04Teaching was actually Hopper's first love.
02:07In 1941, she'd been a college mathematics professor for ten years.
02:12But that year, the attack on Pearl Harbor dragged America into World War II.
02:17Millions of men got sent overseas to fight.
02:21Soon, there weren't enough men left to meet the military's growing needs.
02:25So, the Army and Navy began admitting women, very reluctantly.
02:30Hopper was already a seasoned sailor.
02:32As a kid, she'd captained her own ship, a little sailboat.
02:36One day, out on the lake, a strong gust of wind flipped her vessel.
02:42On shore, her mother shouted,
02:44Remember your great-grandfather, the Admiral!
02:47Yep, Admiral Alexander Russell fought for the Union Navy in the Civil War.
02:52That didn't seem to matter much.
02:54Hopper's application to the Navy was rejected.
02:57But she applied again, and won her commission before the war's end.
03:04After hearing the news, she brought flowers to Admiral Russell's grave.
03:08She knew he wouldn't be too keen on a woman in uniform.
03:12Navy men were used to opening doors for ladies, not working with them.
03:18If she had been a man, she likely would have been shipped off to fight.
03:22Instead, she was sent to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard.
03:27Hopper had no idea what she'd be doing until she walked in the door.
03:32Inside was one of the very first computers,
03:35a five-ton behemoth known as the Harvard Mark I.
03:39Like most people, Hopper had never even seen a computer before.
03:44She was given a week to learn how to program what she called the Beast.
03:48The Mark I helped calculate where rockets would land, a critical part of the war effort.
03:53For someone with Hopper's education, the math was pretty easy.
03:59The real challenge was talking to Mark I.
04:01Its language was just rows of holes punched in paper.
04:05Using a codebook, she would translate her orders into a sequence of dots.
04:10A single program could be long enough to fill a whole book.
04:14It had to be punched into a roll of paper tape and fed into the computer.
04:19And as soon as the machine got to a command it didn't understand, it stopped.
04:24Hopper and her colleagues spent many hours fixing or debugging the code.
04:29She imagined dragons that chewed new holes in the paper,
04:33and gremlins who plugged up carefully punched dots.
04:36In reality, the bugs were plain old mistakes,
04:39along with the occasional insect trapped in the machine.
04:44After the war, Hopper stayed in the Navy, but took a job with a private computer company.
04:50They'd created a different computer, the UNIVAC I.
04:54They wanted to sell it to businesses and government agencies.
04:58Unlike the Mark I, UNIVAC understood letters and numbers.
05:02But for regular folks, the language wasn't all that much easier to understand.
05:07Grace Hopper saw a way to bridge this gap.
05:10A translator program could take human language and turn it into UNIVAC's code.
05:16Instead of teaching people how to speak computer, she'd teach computers how to speak human.
05:21When Hopper first presented the idea, her peers told her it wouldn't work.
05:26She suspected they liked being the only ones who could use these powerful machines.
05:31But if you haven't picked it up already, persistence was kind of her thing.
05:36She continued pursuing the idea in her free time.
05:39She saw the UNIVAC as her star pupil.
05:42She called her translator a compiler, and it was included with every UNIVAC.
05:47But no one used it, until a programmer at a chemical company got desperate.
05:52He had a huge stack of calculations to do and an impossible deadline.
05:57Then he remembered the compiler program that came with the UNIVAC.
06:01He made his deadline, earning a promotion and a raise.
06:05That was the first commercial use of a compiler, and it spread quickly after that.
06:10It was a huge step, but still nowhere close to human communication.
06:16So Hopper and a team of programmers built a language that got even closer.
06:20They called it COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language.
06:25Its commands were English words that made intuitive sense.
06:29Like, the command to show something on a screen is display.
06:33COBOL soon became the most widely used programming language,
06:37and Hopper became something of a celebrity.
06:40She appeared on TV shows as an ambassador from the world of computing.
06:45Meanwhile, she rose to the rank of Rear Admiral in the Navy, just like her great-grandfather.
06:51Today, COBOL is still used in ATMs and other commercial machines.
06:56Its success sparked an explosion of other high-level languages, based on how we speak.
07:01They're used to code everything from cell phones to satellites to video games.
07:06And computers are getting better every day at understanding human language.
07:11Just look at Aphasia here. You can ask her to do everything from ordering dinner at 7 o'clock to calling a car service.
07:18Okay. Ordering 7 cars.