Quotes from Ellen Ullman

You can only get a beginner's mind once.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization.

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'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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.

Debugging: what an odd word. As if bugging were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes.

But you can't stop knowing something, can you?

Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.

The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything? Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.