Ward Cunningham Quotes

• The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.

  Ward Cunningham

  Wrong Answers, Way, Computer

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• What is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

  Ward Cunningham

  Simplicity, Path, Solutions

  "The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part V". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. January 19, 2004.

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• Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a standstill under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.

  Ward Cunningham

  Engineering, Organization, Long

  "The WyCash Portfolio Management System". OOPSLA conference, c2.com. March 26, 1992.

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• Over and over, people try to design systems that make tomorrow's work easy. But when tomorrow comes it turns out they didn't quite understand tomorrow's work, and they actually made it harder.

  Ward Cunningham

  People, Design, Trying

  "Working the Program: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part III". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. January 05, 2004.

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• What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?

  Ward Cunningham

  Simplest

  "The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part V". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. January 19, 2004.

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• The shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn't generally pass through meeting expectations.

  Ward Cunningham

  Expectations, Exceeding Expectations, Path

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• When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing. So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right.

  Ward Cunningham

  Mistake, Trying, Cost

  "Collective Ownership of Code and Text: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part II". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. December 1, 2003.

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• Each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected. You can call it beautiful code when the code also makes it look like the language was made for the problem.

  Ward Cunningham

  Beautiful, Routine, Looks

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• I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it.

  Ward Cunningham

  Mean, Worry, Empowering

  "Collective Ownership of Code and Text: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part II". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. December 01, 2003.

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• When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.

  Ward Cunningham

  Data, Way, Saying No

  Talk at MS Research, November 2004.

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• I don't claim to be a methodologist, but I act like one only because I do methodology to protect myself from crazy methodologists.

  Ward Cunningham

  Crazy, Claims, Methodology

  Talk at MS Research, November 2004.

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• There's been an awful lot of discussion about what is or isn't simple, and people have gotten a pretty sophisticated notion of simplicity, but I'm not sure it has helped.

  Ward Cunningham

  Simple, People, Simplicity

  "The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part V". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. January 19, 2004.

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• Global collaboration is something that Wiki mastered in a small way and here we can master it in a big way.

  Ward Cunningham

  Collaboration, Way, Bigs

  "Ward Cunningham discusses Eclipse, Wiki and Agile Development". Interview with Ward Cunningham at the EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, March 23, 2006.

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• And then there are difficulties. Computers are famous for difficulties. A difficulty is just a blockage from progress. You have to try a lot of things. When you finally find what works, it doesn't tell you a thing. It won't be the same tomorrow. Getting the computer to work is so often dealing with difficulties.

  Ward Cunningham

  Progress, Trying, Tomorrow

  "The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. January 19, 2004.

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• A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know.

  Ward Cunningham

  Trying, Needs, Answers

  "Exploring with Wiki". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. October 20, 2003.

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• When I was at Tek, I was frustrated that computer hardware was being improved faster than computer software. I wanted to invent some software that was completely different, that would grow and change as it was used. That's how wiki came about.

  Ward Cunningham

  Frustrated, Different, Computer

  "Startup mines for riches in collaboration software". The Portland Tribune, March 4, 2008.

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• Why have a locked wiki when you can instead just post static Web pages?

  Ward Cunningham

  Pages, Static, Posts

  Bo Leuf, Ward Cunningham (2001). “The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web”, Addison-Wesley Professional

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