I thought of her programmers sitting in their cubicles, surrounded by the well-dressed swirl of analysts and managers. The "system" comes to them done on paper, in English. "All" they have to do is write the code. But somewhere in that translation between the paper and the code, the clarity breaks down. The world as humans understand it and the world as it must be explained to computers come together in the programmer in a strange state of disjunction.

Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine