118 Quotes by Ellen Ullman

I've been told that women have trouble as engineers because we'd rather relate to people than to machines.

Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.

The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.

I’m an engineer for the same reason anyone is an engineer: a certain love for the intricate lives of things, a belief in a functional definition of reality. I do believe that the operational definition of a thing – how it works – is its most eloquent self-expression.

In this privatized world, what sort of “cultural” conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except “Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked 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.

I used to have dreams in which I was overhearing conversations I had to program. Once, I had to program two people making love. In my dream they sweated and tumbled while I sat with a cramped hand writing code. The couple went from gentle caresses to ever-widening passions, and I despaired as I tried desperately to find a way to express the act of love in the C computer language.

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