Today is a pretty important day! So was yesterday!
December 9th is Grace Hopper's birthday. The 10th is Ada Lovelace's birthday.
If you have daughters, now or ever, you need to tell them about these women!
They pretty much invented programming.
Ada's code never ran, but her contributions are so great, that the language the US Defense Department once required as source code for any software they paid for was named 'Ada'!
She told Charles Baggage's analytical engine what to do back in the early 1800s.
Hopper gave her credit for devising the first conditional loop.
Grace programmed the Harvard Mark1 and the first UNIVAC. She's the one who came up with the idea of symbolic programming languages and compilers that translate them into machine language programs. And she invented COBOL, which will probably run as banking software on mainframes forever.
Happy Birthday, ladies, and thank you!