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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.
She lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring and died at a nearby hospital after a brief illness, said Elizabeth Conlisk, a spokeswoman for Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where Ms. Sammet had earned her undergraduate degree and later endowed a professorship in computer science.
The programming language Ms. Sammet helped bring to life is now more than a half-century old, but billions of lines of COBOL code still run on the mainframe computers that underpin the work of corporations and government agencies around the world.
Ms. Sammet was a graduate student in mathematics when she first encountered a computer in 1949 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She wasn't impressed.
"I thought of a computer as some obscene piece of hardware that I wanted nothing to do with," Ms. Sammet recalled in an interview in 2000.
Her initial aversion was not unusual among the math purists of the time, long before computer science emerged as an academic discipline. Later, Ms. Sammet tried programming calculations onto cardboard punched cards, which were then fed into a computer.
"To my utter astonishment," she said, "I loved it."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html?_r=0
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:03PM
Its a relative thing. My MiL and I guess UiL are genetically and chronologically close siblings.
MiL lives in the same house she's lived for 30 years. Its gonna kill her, I'm sad to say. She broke her leg a few years back tripping on some garden hose and basically spends a couple hours a day suffering trying to maintain her house. Luckily she has grand kids (my kids) to run her lawnmower and snow blower and do grunt work. I like that because a tired teenager is a teenager who's keeping out of trouble LOL, and maybe even learning something.
UiL lives in one of those mid level support retirement communities, they cater lunch and dinner and its pretty tasty, or so he says, and twice a week cleaning and laundry service helps a lot. They kind of baby sit his medication consumption which is good. They have a goal of hosting two group social activities per day and they seem to achieve it most time, he has more of a social life than I do, assuming that work doesn't count.
The house person smiles a lot less and is anxious about stuff a lot more than the renter person who's like "whatever, I contract out for that" to everything thats annoying.
When you're young home ownership is painfully expensive, when you're old home ownership is literally painful. I'm in between and having fun but they'll come a day when house ownership is more of a burden than a benefit.
I find it interesting that I "need" a house for my space and capital intensive hobbies like ham radio and my basement electronics lab and I do carpentry to relax, but for my MiL living in a house is like old person status symbol that she's tough enough to keep doing it and/or able to get the grand kids to act as peasant labor, she doesn't actually "do" anything in her house that takes advantage of it being her house, its just there to be shown off.
Both are basically uneducated and have nothing to think about so TV is high culture to them making them pretty boring to talk to. Their friends watch daytime TV so they talk about "The View" and "Maury" or "Bachelorette" or whatever but I don't participate in TV culture so there's little to talk about. Its not any better or worse for the renter or the house person, if all you're gonna do is watch Oprah reruns for eight to ten hours per day, where you sit doesn't matter much.