Name: Life in code
ISBN: 9781250181695

criddellAug 2023

I bet you'd like Ullman's book Life in Code.

A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a talk given by Whitfield Diffie:

> We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.

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criddellMar 2023

> Basically I see a future where your OS is your internet browser as well as window manager, process manager, etc.

I sure hope you're wrong. It's definitely happening in some respect and to me it feels like we are undoing the shift from corporate controlled, centralized computing to personal computing where users are in control that happened from the late 70's through most of the 90's.

I've posted this quote here before, but I still think about it all the time. In Ellen Ullman's excellent book Life in Code she quotes Whitfield Diffie:

> We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.

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olvy0May 2022

I really loved "Life in Code". The book's combination of intimate autobiography and job description, and a somewhat outsider's view on programming, which she sort of stumbled into, just felt right.

I also liked the interview posted by OP, it summarizes her opinions in a slightly different format. I somehow managed to miss it when I searched for interviews with her after reading the book. Thanks OP!

Things from the book that reverberated with me:

- Her relationship with her father, how she wrote some code to help him with his business. This mirrors a very similar experience I've had, writing simple applications for my dad during junior high and high school to help him with various things for his job. That was a sort of bonding between us.

- Her work in IBM, and how soul-crushingly it was, also reminding me of my first few months in a "real" job.

- Her work in a sort of artists' collective as a young woman, and how they slept in a remote farm and helped the farmer there. Which is wholly different from my own experience and therefore like a peek into a distant world, and yet very real.

- Her fluid sexuality - she had a girlfriend but is now married to a man, which the book mentions in passing but doesn't make a great deal of, which I found refreshing.

Edited to add: - Her descriptions of how San Francisco has changed over the years by the technology boom and bust cycles.

- How she almost became one of the first employees in Google because Larry Page was interested in her opinions.

And that quote from this book already referenced in a sibling comment, “We build our computer systems like we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”...

That quote also affected me deeply since it has a deep connection to my day to day work. For the last decade I've been part of a changing team, maintaining a big sort of internal legacy system, that is sort of mission critical, which started as a messy semi-personal project years ago, and then grew and grew to the point where no one knows it all.

I've printed out this quote and hang it above my desk. I don't explain it to people, but the ones who bother to read it nod their head in understanding.

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ncmncmJun 2021

An excellent presentation on the work of the Friedmans is A Life in Code:

https://bookshop.org/books/a-life-in-code-pioneer-cryptanaly...

but there are several other biographies. The government treated the Friedmans very badly considering how dependent it was on them. Ultimately it was only the Friedmans' sense of duty that prevented wholesale collapse of American cryptanalytic capability.

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criddellJun 2021

I've been talking about this a lot lately, so maybe I'm repeating myself, but Ellen Ullman's (very good) book Life in Code she writes about Whitfield Diffie's (of Diffie-Hellman fame) speech at the 2000 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Toronto.

> "We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again."

I think yielding control back to remote administrators is ultimately a mistake if you care about freedom and privacy. It's why I've come to believe the web, as a platform, is in some ways a giant step backwards (and I do realize that's not a popular opinion here).

I like that Apple is slowing things down. Users are better served by well written native apps IMHO. It makes life more difficult for those of us who write software but also for those who want to sell to, spy on, or control users.

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EamonnMRNov 2020

I like the recommendation at the end for Life In Code by Ellen Ullman. Definitely read it; it's very good and says a lot of things that need to be heard.

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