A biography for Ellen Ullmanhasn’t been written yet.
“I'm a pessimist. But I think I'd describe my pessimism as broken-hearted optimism.”
“No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer.”
“Truly new inventions take time to play out.”
“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.”
“Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.”
“The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.”
“Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good.”
“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.”
“What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.”
“It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature.”
“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 am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens.”
“I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.”
“It is deep in our nature to make tools.”
“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 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.'”
“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.”
“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 relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.”
“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?”