Ellen Ullman Quotes

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When I am writing, and occasionally achieve single focus and presence, I finally feel that is where I'm supposed to be. Everything else is kind of anxiety.

I was a girl who came into the clubhouse, into the treehouse, with the sign on the door saying, 'No girls allowed,' and the reception was not always a good one.

I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens.

It will not work to keep asking men to change. Many have no real objective to do so. There's no reward for them. Why should they change? They're doing well inside the halls of coding.

What happens to people like myself, who have been involved with computing for a long time, is that you begin to see how many of the 'new' ideas are simply old ones coming back into view on the swing of the pendulum, with new and faster hardware to back it up.

Truly new inventions take time to play out.

I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old.

I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress,' computers are problematic, giving and taking away.

The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.

Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.

Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.

I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against 'hostile environments for women.'

When you lose your Visa card, you get a new card with a new number, and any new charges with the old number are blocked. Why can't we do the same with Social Security numbers?

No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer.

I'm pretty bad at crying.

I think many people have wonderful stories inside them and the talent to tell those stories. But the writing life, with its isolation and uncertain outcomes, keeps most from the task.

When I am around people I most admire, I tend to hug the wall.

Writing is a very isolating occupation.

Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers; I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces.

Genetics is where we come from. It's deeply natural to want to know.

My mother told me that my birth mother got pregnant by a married man who didn't want to leave his wife.

There is always one more bug to fix.

Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down.

Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses.

I fear for the world the Internet is creating.

What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.

The world of programmers is not going to change on its own.

When I hear the word 'disruption,' in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning, and we will move that to the people at the top.

All things change, but we always have to think: what are we leaving behind?

If you've ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it's just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it's not.

With every advance, you have to look over your shoulder and know what you're giving up - look over your shoulder and look at what falls away.

A computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very small part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule and clarity.

I'm in no way saying that women can't take a tough code review. I'm saying that no one should have to take one in a boy-puerile atmosphere.

It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature.

People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization.

Software and digital devices are imbued with the values of their creators.

I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment.

Some people hit a profession and just keep going deeper into it, making a life and making it more and more stable. That's not been my experience. I always want to try something new.

With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn't express, not really. It's a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That's what's hard about it.

I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.

It has occurred to me that if people really knew how software got written, I'm not sure they'd give their money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again.

The computer's there to serve the human being, not vice versa.

We don't have to live up to our computer.

People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.

It is deep in our nature to make tools.

Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.

Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we're changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization.

Evolution, dismissed as a sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies.

The web is just another stunning point in the two-hundred-thousand-year history of human beings on earth. The taming of fire; the discovery of penicillin; the publication of 'Jane Eyre' - add anything you like.

Tools are not neutral. The computer is not a neutral tool.

A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error.

I hate the new word processors that want to tell you, as you're typing, that you made a mistake. I have to turn off all that crap. It's like, shut up - I'm thinking now. I will worry about that sort of error later. I'm a human being. I can still read this, even though it's wrong. You stupid machine, the fact that you can't is irrelevant to me.

Abhorring error is not necessarily positive.

Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background.

The human mind, as it turns out, is messy.

It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later, I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears - the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism - there was no reason to think I could escape it forever.

I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.

When knowledge passes into code, it changes state; like water turned to ice, it becomes a new thing, with new properties. We use it, but in a human sense, we no longer know it.

Productivity has always been the justification for the prepackaging of programming knowledge. But it is worth asking about the sort of productivity gains that come from the simplifications of click-and-drag.

It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected.

I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command.

UNIX always presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system.

The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it.

The ability to 'multitask,' to switch rapidly among many competing focuses of attention, has become the hallmark of a successful citizen of the 21st century.

Introduced in the 1960s, multitasking is an engineering strategy for making computers more efficient. Human beings are the slowest elements in a system.

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?

Internet voting is surely coming. Though online ballots cannot be made secure, though the problems of voter authentication and privacy will remain unsolvable, I suspect we'll go ahead and do it anyway.

After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well?

The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface.

I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly.

Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster.

Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious.

Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information.

To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.

Watching a program run is not as revealing as reading its code.

Reading code is like reading all things written: You have to scribble, make a mess, remind yourself that the work comes to you through trial and error and revision.

With all the attention given to the personal computer, it's hard to remember that other companion machine in the room - the printer.

Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good.

Computer programming has always been a self-taught, maverick occupation.

Programmers seem to be changing the world. It would be a relief, for them and for all of us, if they knew something about it.

'I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.' I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person.

I like mysteries.

Through the miracle of natural genetic recombination, each child, with the sole exception of an identical twin, is conceived as a unique being. Even the atmosphere of the womb works its subtle changes, and by the time we emerge into the light, we are our own persons.

Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested.

So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values.

There's some intimacy in reading, some thoughtfulness that doesn't exist in machine experiences.

Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug.

You can only get a beginner's mind once.

I don't like the idea that Facebook controls how people express themselves and changes it periodically according to whatever algorithms they use to figure out what they should do or the whim of some programmer or some CEO. That bothers me a great deal.

I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.

I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for.

I really don't like books when characters are just bad or just good.

I don't consider myself a Jewish writer.

I'm a dark thoughts writer.

I'm a pessimist. But I think I'd describe my pessimism as broken-hearted optimism.

I think that focusing all experiences through the lens of the Internet is an example of not being able to see history through the eyes of others, to be so enamored of one's present time that one cannot see that the world was once elsewise and was not about you.

Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life.

My approach to being a self-taught programmer was to find out who was smart and who would be helpful, and these were - these are both men and women. And without learning from my co-workers, I never could've gone on in the profession as long as I did.

The biggest problem is that people have stopped being critical about the role of the computer in their lives. These machines went from being feared as Big Brother surrogates to being thought of as metaphors for liberty and individual freedom.

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