Ellen Ullman Quotes

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

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?

- Ellen Ullman

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.'

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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

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

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.

- Ellen Ullman

A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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?

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

Reading code is like reading all things written: You have to scribble, make a mess, remind yourself that the work comes to you through trial and error and revision.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.

- Ellen Ullman

It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

'I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.' I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person.

- 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.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly.

- Ellen Ullman

I'm pretty bad at crying.

- Ellen Ullman

Abhorring error is not necessarily positive.

- Ellen Ullman

Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life.

- Ellen Ullman

Truly new inventions take time to play out.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

There is always one more bug to fix.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

You can only get a beginner's mind once.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment.

- Ellen Ullman

Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.

- Ellen Ullman

I don't consider myself a Jewish writer.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old.

- Ellen Ullman

I fear for the world the Internet is creating.

- Ellen Ullman

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

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

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.

- Ellen Ullman

I like mysteries.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

We don't have to live up to our computer.

- Ellen Ullman

I'm a dark thoughts writer.

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

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

- Ellen Ullman

Writing is a very isolating occupation.

- Ellen Ullman

It is deep in our nature to make tools.

- Ellen Ullman