Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html
Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a programming language that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland. She was 89.
The United States Department of Defense, the largest purchaser of computers at the time, set general guidelines for COBOL, including asking for “the maximum use of simple English” to “broaden the base of those who can state problems to computers.” Later, the Pentagon declared it would not buy or lease computers unless they ran COBOL.
Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer at Sperry Rand in the late 1950s, led the effort to bring computer makers together to collaborate on the new programming language. Ms. Hopper is often called the “mother of COBOL,” but she was not one of the six people, including Ms. Sammet, who designed the language — a fact Ms. Sammet rarely failed to point out. (Ms. Sammet worked for Sylvania Electric at the time.)
“I yield to no one in my admiration for Grace,” she said. “But she was not the mother, creator or developer of COBOL.”
Ms. Sammet and the other five programmers did much of the new language’s design during two weeks of nearly round-the-clock work, holed up in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan. Their proposal was presented in November 1959 and accepted with few changes by the computer makers they worked for and the Pentagon.
