118 Quotes by Ellen Ullman

You mean you don't stage the software?" I asked him. "You don't test it?" "Why should we? Everything we do is live all the time, always new, minute by minute.This is the Web! Code it, post it, run it, change it, run it again.

We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.

Computers have no idea what goes on outside of them except what humans tell them.

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.

And ceilings - ceilings! - that had been invisible, up there, of no account, suddenly insisting upon their supreme and deadly importance.

Neither of us had the easy confidence of someone like Harry Minor, who could gleefully complain of "not knowing a fucking thing," then set about knowing it.

Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes.

This is what makes them good engineers. Perfectionism: incinerating perfectionism.