"I learned to program a computer in 1971, and my first programming job came in 1978. Since then, I have taught myself six higher-level programming languages, three assemblers, two data-retrieval languages, eight job-processing languages, seventeen scripting languages, ten types of macros, two object-definition languages, sixty-eight programming-library interfaces, five varieties of networks, and eight operating environments-fifteen, if you cross-multiply the distinct combinations of operating systems and networks. I don't think this makes me particularly unusual. Given the rate of change in computing, anyone who's been around for a while could probably make a list like this." (Ullman 100)
This is Ellen Ullman, defined by her educational and professional accomplishments. But read further into her Close to the Machine and you will she there is much more to her than those aforementioned accomplishments.
"This process of remembering technologies is a little like trying to remember all your lovers: you have to root around in the past and wonder, Let's see. Have I missed anybody? In some ways, my personal life has made me uniquely suited to the technical life. I'm a dedicated serial monogamist-long periods of intense engagement punctuated by times of great restlessness and searching. As hard as this may be on the emotions, it is a good profile for technology.
I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility. This humility is as mandatory as arrogance.
Knowing an IBM mainframe - knowing it as you would a person, with all its good qualities and deficiencies, knowledge gained in years of slow anxious probing - is no use at all when you sit down for the first time in front of a UNIX machine. It is sobering to be a senior programmer and not know how to log on." (Ullman 101)
A life of lovers, learning, and changing with the times; Ullman has learned to express her life's happenings on the pages of her books. It seems to be consoling for her to be able write what she can't verbalize.
