Editing Grace Hopper (section)

=== COBOL ===
[[File: Grace Hopper and UNIVAC.jpg|thumb|Hopper at the [[UNIVAC I]] console, {{Circa|1960}}]]
In the spring of 1959, computer experts from industry and government were brought together in a two-day conference known as the Conference on Data Systems Languages ([[CODASYL]]). Hopper served as a technical consultant to the committee, and many of her former employees served on the short-term committee that defined the new language [[COBOL]] (an acronym for '''CO'''mmon '''B'''usiness-'''O'''riented '''L'''anguage). The new language extended Hopper's FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas from the [[IBM]] equivalent, [[COMTRAN]].  Hopper's belief that programs should be written in a language that was close to English (rather than in [[machine code]] or in languages close to machine code, such as [[assembly language]]s) was captured in the new business language, and COBOL went on to be the most ubiquitous business language to date.<ref name="KWB">{{cite book |last=Beyer |first=Kurt W. |year=2009 |title=Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age |location=Cambridge, MA |publisher=MIT Press |isbn=978-0-262-01310-9}}</ref> Among the members of the committee that worked on COBOL was [[Mount Holyoke College]] alumna [[Jean E. Sammet]].<ref>{{cite news |last=Lohr |first=Steve |date=June 4, 2017 |title=Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220102/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html |archive-date=2022-01-02 |url-access=limited |url-status=live |work=The New York Times |language=en-US |access-date=April 5, 2023}}{{cbignore}}</ref>

From 1967 to 1977, Hopper served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy's Office of Information Systems Planning and was promoted to the rank of [[Captain (United States O-6)|captain]] in 1973. She developed validation software for COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy.<ref name="KBW" />