I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how – the depths and variety of human imagination. Ellen Ullman Read Quote
There’s some intimacy in reading, some thoughtfulness that doesn’t exist in machine experiences. Ellen Ullman Read Quote
Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested. Ellen Ullman Read Quote
Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster. Ellen Ullman Read Quote
Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy. Ellen Ullman Read Quote
Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we’re changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization. Ellen Ullman Read Quote
A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error. Ellen Ullman Read Quote
I hate the new word processors that want to tell you, as you’re typing, that you made a mistake. I have to turn off all that crap. It’s like, shut up – I’m thinking now. I will worry about that sort of error later. I’m a human being. I can still read this, even though it’s wrong. You stupid machine, the fact that you can’t is irrelevant to me. Ellen Ullman Read Quote
