Programming language, mighty descendant of algol.

Dijkstra has this to say of PL/1
"Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane with 7, 000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language - our basic tool mind you! - already escapes our intellectual control."

"Another lesson we should have learned from the recent past is that development
of "richer" or "more powerful" programming languages was a mistake in the sense that these baroque onstrosities, these conglomerations of idiosyncrasies, are really unmanageable both mechanically and mentally."

* E.W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer CACM Vol 15 No 18 Oct 1972

developed Flow-Matic
early pioneer in HW-abstraction,
mathematician, rear Admiral in the US Navy research

entered Navy in 1943 to work for Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard
worked with **Aiken on Harvard Mark I, 3rd person to program it;
worked on Harvard Mark II after war
joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a Senior Mathematician in 1949
discovered 1st computer "bug"
finished Flow-Matic, the first English-language data-processing compiler in 1952: "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."
retired from the Navy at age 80
the first woman to receive America's highest technology award as an individual;
http://www-groups.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hopper.html

developed by a team around Grace Murray Hopper, the first English-language data-processing compiler.

In 1951 [12]:-

... she discovered the first computer "bug." It was a real moth, which she pasted into the UNIVAC I logbook. In 1952 she had an operational compiler. "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."
Hopper's reason for designing a compiler was, she wrote later, because she was lazy and hoped that the introduction of compilers would allow the computer programmer to return to being a mathematician.

http://www-groups.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hopper.html