Grace Hopper's argument, in the early 1950s, was that a computer should be able to translate human-readable instructions into the machine code it actually executed. This was widely regarded inside the programming community of the time as either impossible or undesirable — the prevailing view held that real programmers wrote machine code, and that any abstraction over it would be too slow and too loose to be trusted. Hopper built the A-0 compiler anyway, and later drove the design of FLOW-MATIC, the direct ancestor of COBOL.
Why it was unfashionable
Hopper fought two simultaneous headwinds: an entrenched technical culture that regarded high-level languages as an insult to real engineering, and a Navy bureaucracy uncomfortable with an officer, and a woman, publishing ideas that challenged the status hierarchy of the programming priesthood. She persisted through both, including arguing successfully for the standardization of COBOL across federal agencies.
What the Age of Abundance inherited
Every developer who writes code in a language above assembly — which is to say, essentially every developer alive — benefits from Hopper's foundational wager that programming should be accessible. The more general claim, that tools should be made usable to the broadest possible population rather than gated for a priesthood, is a load-bearing principle of the Age of Abundance and of Coordination Abundance in particular.
The pattern
Hopper demonstrates that democratization is itself a technical contribution. The decision to make a capability legible to non-specialists is not separable from the decision to build the capability; the former often requires more institutional courage than the latter.