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Comment by khaledh | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested, you can find a link below to Kathleen Booth's original report from 1947 titled "Coding for A.R.C." (authored with her -later- husband Andrew Booth)[0]. It details how coding is done for that machine, with a very early form of symbolic instructions that closely resembles what we know as assembly language today. You can see at the end of the report the mapping between machine codes and symbols.

That being said, there doesn't seem to be indication of building an actual assembler, i.e. a program that reads symbolic instructions and produces machine code. AFAIK, the first assembler was built by David Wheeler for the EDSAC.

https://albert.ias.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12111/7941/Bo...

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Indeed, the IEEE credits David Wheeler with the creation of the first assembly language, for which they awarded him a computer pioneer award in 1985[1]:

> Wheeler’s “initial orders” allowed Edsac instructions to be provided in a simple language rather than by writing binary numbers, and made it possible for non-specialists to begin to write programs. This was the first “assembly language” and was the direct precursor of every modern programming language, all of which derive from the desire to let programmers write instructions in a legible form that can then be translated into computer-readable binary.

[1] https://www.computer.org/profiles/david-wheeler

And that's the same Wheeler in the Burrows–Wheeler transform.

"non-specialists".

Back in the day, the work you might dream of computing might be as simple as a matrix multiplication, which while difficult to implement, is certainly not impossible for a beginner; we did exactly that for our first machine language MP in Computer Engineering 190 my freshman year of college. The use cases were just far simpler back then for computers!

Having read the materials, it seems misleading to call it the invention of assembly language. More like the invention of machine programming, i.e. what the paper calls "coding of problems", i.e. turning a problem into machine code.

The mapping of machine code to symbols seems completely ancillary, and as a side comment says, without the demonstration of an assembler and an intent to translate in the other direction, it is premature to say any language has been invented, vs. notation for writing a paper.

The hackaday reference below says she built an assembler. Given how little we know of her achievements and give her credit for those, I would err on the side of crediting her rather than the other interpretation. But just my opinion:)

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