Hopper's trajectory from the Mark I to FLOW-MATIC to COBOL is one of the great arcs in computing.
She had to fight to convince people that programs could be written in English-like words, her colleagues thought the idea was absurd because "computers don't understand English."
This tension is as old as programming itself.
Dijkstra and Hoare spent decades arguing for rigor.
Meanwhile C, JavaScript, and PHP, none of them designed for correctness, won the world.
The languages that ship always beat the languages that are right.
JSON's dominance is one of the most accidental success stories in computing.
Douglas Crockford didn't design it — he said he "discovered" it. It was already there in JavaScript's object literal syntax, which itself traces back to Brendan Eich's 10-day sprint in 1995.
A data format that conquered the internet was a side effect of a language built under absurd time pressure.
Every attempt to replace it has to overcome that kind of accidental ubiquity, which is much harder than overcoming a technical limitation.
ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman.
They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself.
It took another decade before FORTRAN (1957) gave programmers a way to write instructions in something resembling human language.