PERSON
Grace Hopper
American computer scientist (1906–1992) whose 1952 A-0 compiler realized the Tractarian ideal in engineering — a program that translates instructions between formal languages while preserving meaning because meaning, in the Tractarian framework, is structure.
Grace Hopper developed the first compiler at Remington Rand in the early 1950s and led the development of COBOL in the late 1950s. Read through Wittgenstein's framework, Hopper's compiler is the quintessential Tractarian artifact — a program that maps one set of formal structures onto another, preserving meaning because, in the Tractarian framework, meaning is structure. The compiler does not need to understand what the program is about. It maps formal structures onto formal structures. Its elegance is the elegance of the picture theory made operational. COBOL, her later project, attempted to make programming languages look like English — a disguise the later Wittgenstein's philosophy explains could never succeed at its apparent purpose.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Hopper's engineering career was a sustained effort to narrow the gap between human thought and machine specification. The compiler automated the translation between human-readable notation and machine-executable code. COBOL went further, adopting English syntax so that business analysts could read