i am sassa

Meet Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper. She was a sharp and curious kid who started taking alarm clocks apart when she was teeny to see how they worked. I did that with an old-fashioned hair dryer at my grandmother’s house once, but after that I probably just ate some Nilla wafers instead of getting a Ph.D. in Math and Physics at Yale like Grace did.

Grace went on to teach numbers and other things I hate at Vasser College. She took a leave of absence during WWII to join the US Navy under the WAVES program (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service- Wasn’t it nice of them to make an exception for emergencies?). I like to think her request for a leave of absence said something like “BRB. I’m gonna go climb the military ranks like a total boss. I’ll probably go ahead and teach computers to talk while I’m there". Grace never went back to Vasser. The Navy sent her to Harvard to program the first computer, which was about as big as my first apartment. Fun fact: The computer she worked on once shorted out due to a moth getting stuck inside. Grace removed the moth and said that she had “de-bugged” the computer. That moth is now at the Smithsonian, and that saying has been around ever since.

Grace invented the first ever compiler, which is a program that translates simple commands into binary code. Every programming language since then has been built on this work. Probably thinking that she had done quite enough, Grace retired from the Navy at age sixty. It wasn’t long before they begged her to come back, somehow talking her into remaining in active duty for another TWENTY YEARS. She has earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Technology, 40 honorary degrees, and has a guided missile destroyer named after her which is SO BADASS. As a portrait painter, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that she has the most glorious and paintable face I think I’ve ever seen.

Thank you, Grace Hopper.