Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.

Genetics is where we come from. It's deeply natural to want to know.

Computer programming has always been a self-taught, maverick occupation.

There is always one more bug to fix.

To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.

If you've ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it's just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it's not.

Reading code is like reading all things written: You have to scribble, make a mess, remind yourself that the work comes to you through trial and error and revision.

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.

Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses.

Through the miracle of natural genetic recombination, each child, with the sole exception of an identical twin, is conceived as a unique being. Even the atmosphere of the womb works its subtle changes, and by the time we emerge into the light, we are our own persons.

I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against 'hostile environments for women.'

All things change, but we always have to think: what are we leaving behind?

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.

I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old.

Tools are not neutral. The computer is not a neutral tool.

I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.

It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later, I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears - the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism - there was no reason to think I could escape it forever.

The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it.

With all the attention given to the personal computer, it's hard to remember that other companion machine in the room - the printer.

A computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very small part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule and clarity.

Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug.

Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.

I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly.

Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background.

I think many people have wonderful stories inside them and the talent to tell those stories. But the writing life, with its isolation and uncertain outcomes, keeps most from the task.

My approach to being a self-taught programmer was to find out who was smart and who would be helpful, and these were - these are both men and women. And without learning from my co-workers, I never could've gone on in the profession as long as I did.

Abhorring error is not necessarily positive.

I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens.

You can only get a beginner's mind once.

With every advance, you have to look over your shoulder and know what you're giving up - look over your shoulder and look at what falls away.

When I am writing, and occasionally achieve single focus and presence, I finally feel that is where I'm supposed to be. Everything else is kind of anxiety.

I was a girl who came into the clubhouse, into the treehouse, with the sign on the door saying, 'No girls allowed,' and the reception was not always a good one.

It will not work to keep asking men to change. Many have no real objective to do so. There's no reward for them. Why should they change? They're doing well inside the halls of coding.

What happens to people like myself, who have been involved with computing for a long time, is that you begin to see how many of the 'new' ideas are simply old ones coming back into view on the swing of the pendulum, with new and faster hardware to back it up.

Truly new inventions take time to play out.

I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress,' computers are problematic, giving and taking away.

The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.

When you lose your Visa card, you get a new card with a new number, and any new charges with the old number are blocked. Why can't we do the same with Social Security numbers?

No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer.

I'm pretty bad at crying.

When I am around people I most admire, I tend to hug the wall.

Writing is a very isolating occupation.

Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers; I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces.

My mother told me that my birth mother got pregnant by a married man who didn't want to leave his wife.

Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down.

I fear for the world the Internet is creating.

What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.

The world of programmers is not going to change on its own.

When I hear the word 'disruption,' in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning, and we will move that to the people at the top.

I'm in no way saying that women can't take a tough code review. I'm saying that no one should have to take one in a boy-puerile atmosphere.