Close to the Machine
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With a New Introduction by Jaron Lanier A Salon Best Book of the Year In 1997, the computer was still a relatively new tool---a sleek and unforgiving machine that was beyond the grasp of most users. With intimate and unflinching detail, software engineer Ellen Ullman examines the strange ecstasy of being at the forefront of the predominantly male technological revolution, and the difficulty of translating the inherent messiness of human life into artful and efficient code. Close to the Machine is an elegant and revelatory mediation on the dawn of the digital era.
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It's incredibly depressing reading this 20+ years later, when all her criticisms of the interactions between computers and people's lives are still valid (if not even more applicable!).
This was fun!
Ullman gives us glimpses into her life (work and personal) as a software engineer and software consultant. The stories are interlaced with her musings on the technology in our lives, the lure of money and success, the global network, its the underlying machinery and the simplicity and allure of code in comparison to the messiness of real life.
Her anecdotes are highly entertaining and feel very familiar. She talks about the sexiness of shared minds when programming towards a software release date the next morning. How software developments start with a beautiful crystal of simplicity and then go on to become overladen and dark as the irregularities of human thinking invade on it.
She talks of moments where programmers retreat into worlds “closer to the machine, where things can be accomplished.” Where you start to prefer machines over humans for their inherent logic and their clear-set goals.
In her job as consultant she sits in between the people and their very human needs and the programmers that translate that need into a piece of binary code. She details her struggles of having to abstract down human thinking, human meaning into variables and states. And talks about how sometimes you need to protect clients from the greediness of technology when they realize what other information and control they can gain from a piece of software that primarily set out to do good.
The book is from 1997, and even though there is lots of talk about technology and programming languages, it does not feel dated at all, and seems every bit as relevant today as it must have been then.
