Quotes from Ellen Ullman

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

There is always one more bug to fix.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'