Link Copied!
Ward Cunningham Quotes (1949-)
Inventor
About Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (born 26 May 1949) is an American computer programmer, most famous as the inventor of the first wiki, which was first called WikiWikiWeb (now called WardsWiki), and one of the pioneers of software design patterns and Extreme Programming.
Best Ward Cunningham Quotes
Shortest
Earliest
Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Ward Cunningham quotes.
“What is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.”
“Global collaboration is something that Wiki mastered in a small way and here we can master it in a big way.”
“Wikis work best in environments where you're comfortable delegating control to the users of the system.”
“People who understand their collective goals and values are pretty good at self-organizing -- as long as they are allowed to.”
“I don't claim to be a methodologist, but I act like one only because I do methodology to protect myself from crazy methodologists.”
“With wiki, you have to trust people more than you have any reason to trust them. In 1995, it was a safer environment, don’t know if I could have launched wiki today.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What I'm really doing is I'm trying to preserve the right for a programmer to think while he's typing. If you feel that it’s not going well, you can stop and say 'What did I get wrong? Let me correct it.”
“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.”
“Top down hierarchies make communication work when it is expensive, I hope that wiki can be a flagship in this move in the industry to produce computer support for this kind of work and evolve organizational forms.”
“Wiki pages are very much free form. Across the whole wiki there is a hypertext structure, but on a given page, within the versatility of your command of your natural language, you can say whatever needs to be said.”
“Wiki is like a leaky bucket of information. It's losing information every day. But more information is coming in, so the net is positive. Even if it can lose things, wiki always has more to say than it did the day before.”
Ward Cunningham Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Ward Cunningham quotes by topic.
Ward Cunningham on Complexity 2 quotes
“I actually enjoy complexity that's empowering. If it challenges me, the complexity is very pleasant. But sometimes I must deal with complexity that's disempowering. The effort I invest to understand that complexity is tedious work. It doesn't add anything to my abilities.”
Ward Cunningham on Simplicity
“Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.”
Ward Cunningham on Manager
Ward Cunningham on Methodology
“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 on Microsoft
“I thought I would learn faster, and it's a very complicated company. There's a lot of tradition there, and I just wasn't a part of it.”
What Ward Cunningham Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Ward Cunningham shared regarding contemporaries.
Ward Cunningham on Kent Beck
“In the months before I made wiki, we had been having an argument. I think Kent Beck and I were on one side. People who had a lot of faith in the prevailing dogma of software engineering were on the other side. We said, "Collective code ownership is good." They said, "That's ridiculous. You'll never get responsibility. You'll never get quality if you don't have responsibility. And the only way you'll get responsibility is ownership. You have to pin the bugs back on somebody if you want them to ever rise above producing bugs." And I said, "Well that's wrong."”
About Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (born 26 May 1949) is an American computer programmer, most famous as the inventor of the first wiki, which was first called WikiWikiWeb (now called WardsWiki), and one of the pioneers of software design patterns and Extreme Programming.