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.
— Ellen Ullman
Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.
We don't have to live up to our computer.
I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.
I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment.
People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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.
All things change, but we always have to think: what are we leaving behind?
What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.
Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down.
Genetics is where we come from. It's deeply natural to want to know.
When I am around people I most admire, I tend to hug the wall.
No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer.
Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is deep in our nature to make tools.
The computer's there to serve the human being, not vice versa.
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.
Software and digital devices are imbued with the values of their creators.
It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature.
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.
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.
I fear for the world the Internet is creating.
There is always one more bug to fix.
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.
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 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?
Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.
I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old.
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.
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.
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.
People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.
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.
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.
The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization.
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.
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.
The world of programmers is not going to change on its own.
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.
My mother told me that my birth mother got pregnant by a married man who didn't want to leave his wife.
Writing is a very isolating occupation.
I'm pretty bad at crying.
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.'
The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.
Truly new inventions take time to play out.
I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens.
