- Focus
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- Nov 07, 2020
Ellen Ullman Quotes
Most Famous Ellen Ullman Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Girl
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens.
- Doing
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Myself
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Out
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- Nov 07, 2020
Truly new inventions take time to play out.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- I Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.
- Craft
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- Nov 07, 2020
Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.
- Angry
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- Nov 07, 2020
Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.
- Men
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
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?
- Only
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- Nov 07, 2020
No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer.
- Crying
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm pretty bad at crying.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
Writing is a very isolating occupation.
- Only
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
My mother told me that my birth mother got pregnant by a married man who didn't want to leave his wife.
- Bug
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- Nov 07, 2020
There is always one more bug to fix.
- Down
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- Nov 07, 2020
Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down.
- Compound
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Fear
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- Nov 07, 2020
I fear for the world the Internet is creating.
- Hope
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- Nov 07, 2020
What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.
- Own
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- Nov 07, 2020
The world of programmers is not going to change on its own.
- Money
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Logic
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Saying
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Canvas
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- Nov 07, 2020
It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature.
- Nothing
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- Nov 07, 2020
People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock. Nothing could be further from the truth.
- don't Care
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- Nov 07, 2020
I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment.
- Keep Going
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Bounded
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Live
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- Nov 07, 2020
We don't have to live up to our computer.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.
- Make
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- Nov 07, 2020
It is deep in our nature to make tools.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Fire
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Necessarily
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- Nov 07, 2020
Abhorring error is not necessarily positive.
- Foreground
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Human Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
The human mind, as it turns out, is messy.
- Lose
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Knowledge
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Knowledge
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Everything
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020
UNIX always presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system.
- Attention
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Human
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- Nov 07, 2020
Introduced in the 1960s, multitasking is an engineering strategy for making computers more efficient. Human beings are the slowest elements in a system.
- Human
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- Nov 07, 2020
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?
- Internet
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Credit Card
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- Nov 07, 2020
After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well?
- Put
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- Nov 07, 2020
The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface.
- Compromise
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Disaster
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Belief
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- Nov 07, 2020
Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious.
- Information
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- Nov 07, 2020
Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information.
- Reading
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Hard
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- Nov 07, 2020
With all the attention given to the personal computer, it's hard to remember that other companion machine in the room - the printer.
- Out
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- Nov 07, 2020
Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good.
- Relief
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
'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.
- Mysteries
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- Nov 07, 2020
I like mysteries.
- Light
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Poor
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Machine
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- Nov 07, 2020
There's some intimacy in reading, some thoughtfulness that doesn't exist in machine experiences.
- Change
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- Nov 07, 2020
Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug.
- Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
You can only get a beginner's mind once.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Imagination
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for.
- Jewish
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- Nov 07, 2020
I don't consider myself a Jewish writer.
- Nov 07, 2020
I'm a dark thoughts writer.
- Pessimism
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm a pessimist. But I think I'd describe my pessimism as broken-hearted optimism.
- Enamored
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020