Top 50 Ellen Ullman Quotes

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

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?

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.

Abhorring error is not necessarily positive.

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

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.

Writing is a very isolating occupation.

There is always one more bug to fix.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I really don’t like books when characters are just bad or just good.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I’m pretty bad at crying.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization.

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.

Truly new inventions take time to play out.