“To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.“
Programmers don’t not like to talk because they prefer machines to people… they just cannot be interrupted.
Culture of research engineers: “Strange behavior is expected, it’s respected, a sign that you are intelligent and as close to the machine as you can get.”
“The basic idea of a graphical interface is that it does not allow anything alarming to happen.”
Come in, CQ (1996)
“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.”
The Dumbing Down of Programming: Some Thoughts on Programming, Knowing, and the Nature of “Easy” (1998)
“And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: we build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”
“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?”
“Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.”
What We Were Afraid of As We Feared Y2K (1999-2000)
“The human reaction to the technology itself—our using it, imagining what else we can do with it—determines what the future will be. Technology is not the driver of change; what drives technology is human desire.”
When thinking about fixes, what should the new “upper limit” year be that is designed for?
The Museum of Me (1998)
The Internet → disintermediation: capitalism without salespeople, brokers, reviewers… without sidewalks, vendors, other customers
“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.” The web can leave us “alone, adrift in a sea of empty, illusory, misery-inducing choice.”
Programming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines “Life” (2002)
On consciousness: “I told him I think human existence as a species is predicated on this web of social interactions, and for this we must learn to identify individuals. And out of that, the recognition of the identity of others, comes our own identity, the sense that we exist, ourselves, our self. Everything we call consciousness unwinds from that.”