Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages. The FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.