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Who wrote the first computer program?

The first functional computer program was written by Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992), an admiral in the United States Navy. She created a program for the Mark I computer, the first fully automatic calculator, which was developed in 1944. During the 1950s Hopper directed the work that developed one of the most widely used computer programming languages, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language). She is also credited with coining the term bug to refer to computer program errors. The story goes that her machine had broken down, and when she looked into the problem, she discovered a dead moth in the computer. As she removed the moth, she reportedly announced that she was "debugging the machine." (Some scholars contend that the term had been used earlier by other scientists and therefore did not originate with Hopper.) Hopper served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 until 1986, and...

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