118 Quotes by Ellen Ullman

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

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.

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 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.

I fear for the world the Internet is creating.

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

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

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.

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