Ms. Hopper is often called the “mother of COBOL,” but she was not one of the six people, including
Ms. Sammet, who designed the language — a fact Ms. Sammet rarely failed to point out.
Lois Haibt, a contemporary of Ms. Sammet’s at IBM, where Ms. Sammet worked for nearly three decades, observed, “They
took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills — bridge players, chess players, even women.”
Ms. Sammet became one of the most prominent women of her generation in computing.
Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 -
By STEVE LOHRJUNE 4, 2017
Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a programming language
that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland.
The programming language Ms. Sammet helped bring to life is now more than a half-century old, but billions of lines of COBOL code still run on the mainframe computers
that underpin the work of corporations and government agencies around the world.
Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Princeton University, said COBOL “really was very good at handling formatted data.”
As it evolved, Ms. Sammet pushed to inject more engineering discipline into the language to make it more useful
and reliable in industries like banking, health care and retailing, and for government agencies
