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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm pretty bad at crying. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" It is deep in our nature to make tools. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "