Ellen Ullman

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

“I don't consider myself a Jewish writer.”

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

“'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”