Ellen Ullman Quotes
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. . . . Read more

-Ellen Ullman
The machine seemed to understand time and space, but it didn’t, not as we do. We are analog, fluid, swimming in a flowing sea of events, where one moment contains the next, is the next, since the notion of “moment” itself is the illusion. The machine—it—is digital, and digit . . . Read more

-Ellen Ullman
But you can't stop knowing something, can you?

-Ellen Ullman
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Do I have to recite any further risks you have taken? How much you have not conformed? How much internal bravery this implies?

-Ellen Ullman
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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 . . . Read more

-Ellen Ullman
I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we . . . Read more

-Ellen Ullman
I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.

-Ellen Ullman
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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.

-Ellen Ullman
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