Life in Code Quotes

“We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“I fear for the world the Internet is creating. 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. Physical reality—the discomfort and difficulty of abandoning one’s normal life—put a natural break on the formation of cults, separatist colonies, underground groups, apocalyptic churches, and extreme political parties.

But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes “truth.” Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer’s courage flags.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Yet, when we allow complexity to be hidden and handled for us, we should at least notice what we are giving up. We risk becoming users of components, handlers of black boxes that do not open or don’t seem worth opening. We risk becoming people who cannot really fix things, who can only swap components, work with mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. But when something breaks or goes wrong or needs fundamental change, what will we do except stand helpless in the face of our own creations”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“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.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years. Here was the arrangement: I was the first engineer hired by a start-up software company. In exchange for large quantities of stock that might be worth something someday, I was supposed to give up my life.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“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.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“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.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“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.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“There, in that presumed paradise, the engineers were stranded in the company of an infantile mentality. They created artificial smartness, made a simulacrum of intelligence. But what they talked to all day was little more than a mechanism that read bits off a disk drive. If a comma in the code was out of place, it complained like a kid who won’t tolerate a pea touching the mashed potatoes. And, exhausted though the programmer may be, the machine was like an uncanny child that never got tired. There was Karl and the rest of the team, fitting the general definition of the modern software engineer: a man left alone all day with a cranky, illiterate thing, which he must somehow make grow up. It was an odd and satisfying gender revenge.

Is it any surprise that these isolated men need relief, seek company, hook up

This is not to say that women are not capable of engineering’s male-like isolation. Until I became a programmer, I didn’t thoroughly understand the usefulness of such isolation: the silence, the reduction of life to thought and form; for example, going off to a dark room to work on a program when relations with people get difficult. I’m perfectly capable of this isolation. I first noticed it during the visit of a particularly tiresome guest. All I could think was: There’s that bug waiting for me, I really should go find that bug.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Uber’s drivers are the R&D for Uber’s driverless future. They are spending their labor and capital investments (cars) on their own future unemployment.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“I've been told that women have trouble as engineers because we'd rather relate to people than to machines.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“The problem with programming is not that the computer isn’t logical—the computer is terribly logical, relentlessly literal-minded”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“I once worked on a project in which a software product originally written for UNIX was being redesigned and implemented on Windows NT. Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows and Microsoft Visual C++. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screens full of windows and toolbars and dialogues, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and and unexplainable outcomes, they stood agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to not knowing. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall 'productivity' of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was not the handiwork of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of 'hard.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Computers have no idea what goes on outside of them except what humans tell them.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Life is pressuring us to live by the robots’ pleasures, I thought. Our appetites have given way to theirs. Robots aren’t becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Somehow, even if it means laws and rules and governments, we must find our way back to the technologists’ dream of the internet, the free exchanges among millions of equals; the following of links to links, unobserved, as we desire; the personal web pages we created, of our own designs, defeating the domination of Microsoft’s and Apple’s standard human interfaces. We must go back to that internet, even if it existed for only a flickering moment, or never existed except in idylls and nostalgia. We must route around the new bad corporate net; or create a superset of it; or an alternative. Or something.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet, in a world where “truth” is a variable concept—where any belief can find its adherents—how can a consensus be formed? How can we arrive at the compromises that must underlie the workings of any successful society?”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes “truth.” Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer’s courage flags.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Technology is not the driver of change; what drives technology is human desire.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one,”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“In this universe of privately controlled education, each charter school can choose the curricula of its choice: Evolution is just a theory, the Bible is a literal history, dinosaurs and human beings simultaneously inhabited the earth, men are superior to women, white Christians to everyone else, and so on. Private and charter schools are like websites: they can foster any belief, shatter the idea that there is anything called truth,”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Computer science was then generally a subdepartment of electrical engineering,”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Over the years, as I listened to the engineering give-and-take over the question of artificial life-forms, I kept coming up against something obdurate inside myself, some stubborn resistance to the definition of “life” that was being promulgated. It seemed to me too reductive of what we are, too mechanistic. Even if I could not quite get myself to believe in God or the soul or the Tao or some other metaphor for the ineffable spark of life, still, as I sat there high in the balcony of the Stanford lecture hall, listening to the cyberneticists’ claims to be on the path toward the creation of a sentient being, I found myself muttering, No, that’s not right, we’re not just mechanisms, you’re missing something, there’s something else, something more. But then I had to ask myself: What else could there be?”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet, in a world where ‘truth’ is a variable concept — where any belief can find its adherents — how can a consensus be formed? How can we arrive at the compromises that must underline the workings of any successful society?”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“IV. Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology