Do we like Grace Hopper?
Our score: 9 out of 10. A decades-long career that helped make computing usable for everyone, with no harmful words or acts turning up, though the record on her private views is thin.
Grace Hopper was born in New York at the end of 1906 and took to maths early. Vassar turned her down at 16 over her Latin scores, then let her in the next year, and she went on to a Yale master's in 1930 and a PhD in 1934. So the woman who later wrote the rulebook for friendly computer languages started out by being told no.
When the US entered World War II she tried to join the Navy and was knocked back over her age, her weight and the importance of her teaching job. She got in anyway in 1943 with a weight exemption, graduated first in her class, and was sent to Harvard's computation project. Not bad for someone the Navy first waved off.
Her big idea was that programmers should write in something close to English and let a compiler translate it into machine code. She finished the first compiler in 1952, and her work fed into COBOL, the first widely used language of its kind. She was recalled to active duty at 60 and retired as a rear admiral at 79.
On the harm test, there is nothing here: no campaigning against anyone, no conspiracy rabbit holes, and no dodgy company that turned up in the sources we read. Searches for court cases, allegations and criticism found none against her. Yale singled her out because she “achieved eminence in fields historically dominated by men”, which is the president's line, not hers. The record is thin on her private opinions, and we won't guess at them.
The good stuff is a long list. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom after her death, and Yale swapped John C. Calhoun's name off a residential college for hers in 2017. Her saying “it's much easier to apologize than to get permission” is now a workplace cliché, though it was a quip, not a licence to cut corners.
Nothing new has turned up on her lately, since she died in 1992, and her name mostly pops up through the Grace Hopper Celebration conference and the odd honour. Where you land is easy here: she was a trailblazer who left the door open behind her. If you were sorting your heroes, she would be near the top of the pile.