Grace Hopper didn&#x27;t invent the compiler in the sense that we understand the term now (a semantics preserving translation from a source language to a target language). What her team did, was to produce a linker, the A-0_System.<p>It is also wrong to say that Hopper is 
&quot;largely the reason coders no longer need to write in ones and zeros&quot;. K. Zuse&#x27;s Plankalkuel [2] is from the 1940s, and the first high-level programming languages. And formalisms like the lambda calculus or mu-recursive functions are even older, Turing complete and hardly based on 0s and 1s.<p>It&#x27;s also wrong to say without Lovelace we might not have computers, or indeed that she was the first programmer. Humans have been working on automata (that evolved into computers) by making them more powerful, e.g. the Antikythera mechanism [3]. It&#x27;s also wrong to say that Lovelace was the first programmer. As far as one can see from the notes, she helped Babbage write down, and popularise his ideas.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A-0_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A-0_System</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plankalk%C3%BCl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plankalk%C3%BCl</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Antikythera_mechanism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Antikythera_mechanism</a>