Ward Cunningham

1949– · American computer programmer

Topics: software design, software engineering, engineering leadership, simplicity

• The code might be organized in a hierarchy, but the solution has more dimensions than will fit in a hierarchy. So when you discover a solution in a dimension that crosses across the hierarchy, you just have to go where the solution takes you and put the solution in.

  — Ward Cunningham

• People who understand their collective goals and values are pretty good at self-organizing -- as long as they are allowed to.

  — Ward Cunningham

• 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

• Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

  — Ward Cunningham

• 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.

  — Ward Cunningham

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

  — Ward Cunningham

• Many people have experience with a program that's gotten out of control. They have an idea. They think they know what they want to do. But when they go to put the idea in, the idea is forgotten by the time they've figured out how to put it in.

  — Ward Cunningham

• 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.

  — Ward Cunningham

• 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

• Putting a new feature into a program is important, but refactoring so new features can be added in the future is equally important.

  — Ward Cunningham

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

  — Ward Cunningham

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

  — Ward Cunningham

• When people work code they can often see things I set out to do that they wouldn't notice otherwise. And there are no obligations to say, "Ward you're brilliant," but sometimes they say, "Ward you're brilliant." And that strokes my ego. Pride of ownership? You bet.

  — Ward Cunningham

• 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.

  — Ward Cunningham

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

  — Ward Cunningham

• A wiki is a place to write in the same way that a party is a place to talk.

  — Ward Cunningham

• 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

• Often as you move comments around and have similar comments adjacent to each other, you find that half of the words can be cut out. Because a sentence says it all if the sentence is in just the right place.

  — Ward Cunningham

• 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.

  — Ward Cunningham

• I'm not a fan of classification. It is very difficult to come up with a classification scheme that's useful when what you're most interested in is things that don't fit in, things that you didn't expect.

  — Ward Cunningham