a computer before it was implemented, and there was for the first time an available set of mathematical subroutines which were more or less standardized in the way you put data into them and the way you got data out of them, and made it possible to begin to write programs a little more rapidly. Grace Murray Hopper
subroutines, I recognized something else was happening in the prgramming group. We were using subroutines. We were copying routines from one program into another. Two things wrong with that: programmers are lousy adders. Programmers are lousy copyists (B’s turned into 13’s, 4’s into A’s). It therefore seemed sensible instead of having programmers copy the subroutines, to have the computer copy the subroutines. Out of that came the A-0 compiler. Grace Murray Hopper