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