Technophilia and Its Discontents

Female software engineers are so rare, that when Ellen Ullman's autobiographical Close to the Machine : Technophilia and Its Discontents came out in 1997 I bought three copies and forced some of my friends to read the book.

To my delight, I recently found a two-part article by Ullman in Salon about "The dumbing-down of programming". In Part 1, "Rebelling against microsoft, "my computer" and easy-to-use wizards, an engineer rediscovers the joys of difficult computing." she writes: "Not content with infantilizing the end user, the purveyors of point-and-click seem determined to infantilize the programmer as well." In Part 2, "Returning to the source. Once knowledge disappears into code, how do we retrieve it?" she describes programming "as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting."

Excerpts from Close to the Machine can also be found on Salon (Excerpt 1, Excerpt2).