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Quotes from A Conversation with Ward Cunningham — Ward Cunningham

born 1949 United States

← All quotes by Ward Cunningham

26 quotes

In creating wiki, I wanted to stroke that story-telling nature in all of us.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

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

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

I think we can become excellent predictors. It's just that we're careful not to depend upon prediction anymore than we have to.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

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.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

I say, forget all that and ask yourself, "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

What you get as a wiki reader is access to people who had no voice before.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

Wikis work best in environments where you're comfortable delegating control to the users of the system.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

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.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

A wiki is always in the process of being organized. But for every hour spent organizing, two more hours are spent adding new material. So the status quo for a wiki is always partially organized.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

To worry about tomorrow is to detract from your work today. Time you spend thinking about tomorrow is time you're not spending thinking about what to do today.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

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.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

It was a turning point in my programming career when I realized that I didn't have to win every argument.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

Everything is subject to refactoring.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

There is an art to knowing where things should be checked and making sure that the program fails fast if you make a mistake. That kind of choosing is part of the art of simplification.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

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.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

My specific purpose for the first wiki was to create an environment where we might link together each other's experience to discover the pattern language of programming.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

The decisions I made designing wiki were very much inspired by my desire to create a model for the collaborative process I thought should happen in large code bases. I wanted wiki to mimic that.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

We erased a problem by not trying to erase the problem, by saying, "This is in the nature of what we do." It's really weird that it could be that simple.

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ward Cunningham (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.