I spent some time watching all the Grace Hopper videos on the youtubes, as I prepared for what up North is a horrible storm, but here in Miami is, so far, a breezy and clear day. You can hear her talk about how subroutines used to be literal handwritten pages of instructions in notebooks. When you wanted SIN or COS you would go over to whoever had the notebook with the working version, and copy it out into your code.
It was this experience that guided her as she wrote the first compilers, but as you listen to her stories you can see her ponder the meta-questions of computation as well - she uses as the example how a game of basketball sparked her solution to a troublesome issue in her first single pass compiler, leading to her writing what must have been the first jump table. How, she asked herself, can we get a computer to capture this geometry of the mind. What was it that made her brain think of jump tables while playing basketball?
When asked about AI, she poo-pooed theoretical work, and emphasized practical needs: data processing and expert systems for field commanders. Hopper's journey from abstract thought to concrete application mirrors our ongoing struggle in computer science, as does her struggle to get the military to adopt new technology, which she relates with anecdote after anecdote - clearly the hardest thing she did in her career was get support for computers into the Navy bureaucracy.
This year I've attended a birthday and a funeral, and a lot of our community was at both. But there hasn't been a good offensive-minded conference for us to attend in the States after INFILTRATE ended. We've needed one. Our collective knowledge, like Hopper's compiler, builds upon itself, each pass adding depth and functionality.
Two upcoming conferences, RE:VERSE in Orlando and District:CON in DC, have now arisen to continue this tradition. They're not just tech showcases, but gatherings of minds, a hive of soldier ants collected around a temporary bivouak, each attendee contributing to our shared codebase of ideas, as if scribbled in a 1950's coders notebook. We're still trying to capture the geometry of thought, one exploit at a time. And I hope to see everyone there!