Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Ellen Ullman

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

There is always one more bug to fix.

I fear for the world the Internet is creating.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I'm pretty bad at crying.

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

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.'

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Truly new inventions take time to play out.

It is deep in our nature to make tools.

Writing is a very isolating occupation.

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

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

Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization.