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This looks like a review or comment on something, that Ellen wrote, but I've no idea what, it does not link to anything ?
From 'Life in Code': "We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…
I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents". The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective…
A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.
FWIW - I found "The Bug", by Ellen Ullman, to be a really engrossing piece of fiction to read. I wasn't aware she'd authored other works. I'll have to check them out!
I believe this is a side-effect of the "creative" aspect of computer programming. Creative jobs tend to have impostor syndrome, because there is no piece of paper that you receive that says "this person is 100% certified to be a song writer" or whatever that creative job is. Since software engineering also has no paper certificate, apprenticeship, mastership, etc, there is no proof that you know what you are doing, and it's all a little too loosey-goosey "figure it out for that one job". There's no certainty that you're doing it right.
A Computer Science degree is about as much evidence of you knowing what you're doing as a warranty on a hammer and chisel is evidence that you know how to cut wood joints. Software engineering is a trade, completely distinct from Computer Science. That's why so many people in the industry don't need a degree. You learn the trade on the job.
It's just bizarre that we don't have apprenticeships or trade organizations to ratify someone as a Real Programmer(TM). I can hire someone with 3 years experience working as a programmer and they'll turn out to be almost incompetent. That shouldn't be possible, especially for a job that pays $140,000. But I guess it happens with construction contractors too, so maybe it's not surprising?
This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…
I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey squares with faded little pictures on them. What are they? What were they used for?
Perhaps they know something about electronics. They have opened a few of these mysterious squares. There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do?
The people of medieval Britain could see the ruins of Roman architecture dotting their landscape. They hadn't seen those people in a long while and had no means to repair the aqueducts or high ways. Yet they built on them and around them none the less. A building is a building and a wall is a wall.
But computers? And the hardware we use to build these artifacts of the mind? Vastly more complicated and difficult to reproduce from first principles.
This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…
Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...