"Margaret Hamilton", "Ada Lovelace", "Joan Clarke", and "Carol Shaw". All well known names of women who gave it their all to make Computer Science as a field what it is today. Be it religion or politics, one of the most common phrases we hear by detractors or followers is "What has Jesus/God/President Trump/Obama done for you?", and so, in terms of which of these women have done the most for me as a software developer, I must say, none of them come even close to Grace Hopper.
Ignoring her fight for recognition among a male dominated field (which is largely admirable in its own right and shouldn't be ignored outside of the context of this particular blog entry), Hopper had a mind set in the future, demonstrated by her programming technique stemming from Basketball's "forward throw", and her willingless to ligitimize "silly ideas" such as speaking to a computer in a clear human-like language.
As a student who started his career in the early 21st century (in the first decade, to be precise) I cannot work out the functioning of perforated cards as a legitimate programming device. For me, programming has always been about bright instructions in english on a dark background, and it has always made sense, in a very concrete way (even though abstraction is one of the core principles of programming). The fact that I am able to write letters into the processor (which in no other context mean anything at all) and receive an actual response is one of the reasons I used to believe compilers worked on magic.
And perhaps they do, perhaps they are a manic concoction from the ancient magics of "symbology" and "mathematics", concocted by a witch called Grace Hopper, aided by a visionary instinct and (perhaps) a dash of madness.
