2012-02-10
Explanation
This comic is a tribute to Grace Hopper (1906-1992), the pioneering computer scientist and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral. The comic presents her as a supernatural figure who introduces herself and lists her remarkable achievements: helping build the Mark I computer during World War II, writing the first compiler, and leading the group that created FLOW-MATIC, the precursor to COBOL. She then declares that whenever someone says "women can't program," she grows more powerful.
The comic escalates her power to absurd, supervillain-like proportions, with her cackling maniacally and threatening that if she grows powerful enough to take physical form, her wrath will be "without bound." When someone asks what she would do in physical form, the answer is: "She will remove all the commenting on someone else's code just before it's handed to you for debugging!" -- a punishment any programmer would find truly horrifying. The comic celebrates Hopper's genuine accomplishments while using humor to address sexism in the tech industry, suggesting that dismissing women in programming only strengthens the legacy of the woman who essentially helped invent the field.