> _Since this talk is being taped, I am forced therefore to remind you that nothing I say represents the plans and policies of the Department of the Navy or the Naval Service at large. Everything I say is purely the opinion of the speaker!_ > > _I'm appalled at you, in a way. You're all "Establishment." And I think I spent 20 years fighting the "Establishment."_ > > _In the early years of programming languages, the most frequent phrase we heard was that the only way to program a computer was in octal. Of course a few years later a few people admitted that maybe you could use assembly language. But the entire establishment was firmly convinced that the only way to write an efficient program was in octal._ > > _They totally forgot what happened to me when I joined Eckert-Mauchly. They were building BINAC, a binary computer. We programmed it in octal. Thinking I was still a mathematician, I taught myself to add, subtract, and multiply, and even divide in octal. I was really good, until the end of the month, and then my check- book didn't balance! (Laughter) It stayed out of balance for three months until I got hold of my brother who's a banker. After several evenings of work he informed me that at intervals I had subtracted in octal. And I faced the major problem of living in two different worlds. That may have been one of the things that sent me to get rid of octal as far as possible._ > > -Grace Hopper, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conference, June 1978. --- > _Probably the most dangerous phrase you can ever use in a computer environment is that dreadful one: "But we've always done it that way." That's a forbidden phrase in my office. To emphasize the fact I keep a clock that goes entirely counter clockwise._ > -Grace Hopper --- > _If anyone says "But we've always done it that way" I will immediately materialize and haunt you for 24 hours._ > -Grace Hopper --- > _So I want to tell something to all the young people here. On many many many occasions you'll find it is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission. You do it! Then if someone comes after ya and says "Were you supposed to do that?" you say "Aw gee I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do that."_ > -Grace Hopper ---