On Sun, 15 Feb 1998, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:

fun new book: "close to the machine" by Ellen Ullman. anybody here seen/read it? a highly personal and emotional book at times about working in the computer industry. author is a software engineer whose done a lot of contract work. I think many here will find it worth a look and/or worth

I read it. After a while I noticed that I had a lot in common with the young programmer that she had an affair with. It took a while to come to terms with being a "type" :) There were two things about the book that I disliked: 1) Macho-computing. A number of consultants tend to act as if they are sliting the atom or landing a man on the moon as they work. While I agree that programming is hard work, and that a lot of what programmers do is on the edge, it is hardly ground breaking to implement YA DBMS, even if it is Java based and web-centric. 2) I think she was tring to hard to look technical. -- sal@panix.com Salvatore Denaro "The reality of the software business today is that if you find something that can make you ridiculously rich, then that's something that Microsoft is going to take away from you." -- Max Metral