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" 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. "

Ellen Ullman

Writing

My Life

People

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" Writing is a very isolating occupation. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Ellen Ullman

I Am

Intimidated

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 fear for the world the Internet is creating. "

" 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. "

" Abhorring error is not necessarily positive. "

" I don't consider myself a Jewish writer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "