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.

Ellen Ullman

Age You Who

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

Ellen Ullman

Design Art T

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

Ellen Ullman

Where Want T

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

Ellen Ullman

Men Computers West

There is always one more bug to fix.

Ellen Ullman

Ways Way T

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.

Ellen Ullman

Would World Us

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.

Ellen Ullman

Age You Who

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.

Ellen Ullman

Knowledge Worth Ways

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.

Ellen Ullman

You Wrong Worry

Writing is a very isolating occupation.

Ellen Ullman

Writing Very Up

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

Ellen Ullman

Society Knowledge Hope

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.

Ellen Ullman

Great Understanding Understand

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

Ellen Ullman

You Ways Way

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

Ellen Ullman

Art Tim Think

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.

Ellen Ullman

Money Word Will

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

Ellen Ullman

You Villains Villain

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

Ellen Ullman

Wall UN Tend

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.'

Ellen Ullman

Women Men Legal

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

Ellen Ullman

Wit Tent Ten

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.

Ellen Ullman

You Web Wanted

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.

Ellen Ullman

Work Time Change

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.

Ellen Ullman

I like mysteries.

Ellen Ullman

Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information.

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

My approach to being a self-taught programmer was to find out who was smart and who would be helpful, and these were - these are both men and women. And without learning from my co-workers, I never could've gone on in the profession as long as I did.

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization.

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

You can only get a beginner's mind once.

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

I fear for the world the Internet is creating.

Ellen Ullman

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.

Ellen Ullman

Truly new inventions take time to play out.

Ellen Ullman