That would be Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.I recall that we had a COBOL program written by the US Navy, the spiritual home of COBOL, which supposedly drew flowcharts from COBOL source code. That had appallingly long variable names throughout and the contents of the variables were equally unnecessarily long. There was a logical flag in the source code parsing routine named IS-THIS-A-SENTENCE which had possible values YES, NO and somewhat oddly WAS so that the test on it read IF IS-THIS-A-SENTENCE EQUALS "YES" ... These values weren't equated to single character values, so the flags themselves occupied three text characters in memory. Apart from its tediously long source code we never got the program to work properly, at least not on the source code for our programs. It printed the flowchart on continuous line printer stationery but for some reason flow lines had a habit of disappearing through the perforations between the pages and not appearing on the next page. Clever people, these naval programmers. We never did work out how they managed to do that but maybe it was a comment on our program structure.
Apparently COBOL's creator Grace Hopper died in January 1992 and the first text message to a mobile phone was sent at the end of that year, so she never had to endure the extreme brevity of texting and trying to fit her words into 160 characters. Just as well really. By the time computers became capable of parsing normal language young people gave up using it. Just typical!
... building on the female legacy of Ada Lovelace, who was much better looking. I know nothing about the ADA language but have read that that is also heavily used by the DoD. So are we going to get a humorous picture about ADA now? Old ladies reprogramming fly by wire fighter planes maybe? No, you'd need a heavy transport plane to carry Babbage's computer onboard ... along with the steam engine to power it.That would be Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.
Not Y2K specific, but this created quite the fiasco in MI at one point. I don't think this one was really public common knowledge but basically in the 90s guys were retiring from the state of MI, collecting their pensions, and simultaneously taking contract work with the state. This resulted in a regulation that retired / pension-collecting employees couldn't take contract/for-profit jobs from the state. Sounds good until 2 of the last 3 Cobol programmers and mainframe admins retire, and a consultancy firm over-writes an entire production database with test data. They literally could not legally pay my dad or his friend to come in and fix it. My dad refused, his friend went in and restored the entire DB (A very important one to say the least) from approximately 48 hour old tape backups. "Have fun re-entering the last 2 days of data, and never call me again."If you were a veteran retired COBOL programmer in the late 1990s, you could pick up quite a bit of cash by hiring yourself out to fix COBOL programs for Y2K.