Ward Cunningham quotes - page 2

Ward Cunningham is an American computer programmer, best known for creating the first wiki. His work has had a profound impact on online collaboration and knowledge sharing. He pioneered concepts that now underpin many modern collaborative platforms. Here are 78 of his quotes:

People who understand their collective goals and values are pretty good at self-organizing -- as long as they are allowed to. (Ward Cunningham)
Wikis work best in environments where you're comfortable delegating control to the users of the system. View quote
Ward Cunningham
Wiki helped define the category of social software. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Ward Cunningham
Cooperation has a transactional nature, we agree it is a mutual good. Collaboration is deeper, we don't know what the transaction is, or if there is one, but if I give of myself to this collaboration, some good will come out of it. You have to trust somebody to collaborate. View quote
Ward Cunningham
Discussion groups tend to keep covering the same ground over and over again, because people forget what was said before. I think the invention of the Frequently Asked Questions, the FAQ, was a response to that. A lot of times just reading the FAQ is more valuable than joining the discussion group. View quote
Ward Cunningham
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. View quote
Ward Cunningham
The idea of where does an idea come from and who should get credit for it is pretty soft. But I think people are pretty good at dealing with that softness and recognizing contribution when they know the people involved. With collective ownership, we create a social situation where you can get to know a person by how they spin their intellect into source code statements. View quote
Ward Cunningham
What you get as a wiki reader is access to people who had no voice before. View quote
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)
There is a programming smell here... which is kind of like the smell in your refrigerator, you know. There's a sign that there's something wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on it. But you know if you leave it there, its only going to get worse. View quote
Ward Cunningham
A wiki is a work sustained by a community. View quote
Ward Cunningham
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. View quote
Ward Cunningham
Before wikis, computer writing was all about the words. The computer could help you type them, spell them, hyphenate them, size them, shape them, and align them. But when it came to developing your thought, well, you were on your own. View quote
Ward Cunningham
One's words are a gift to the community. For the wiki nature to take whole, you have to let go of your words. You have to be okay with that. This goes into the name, called refactoring. To collaborate on a work, one must trust. The reason the cooperation happens is we are people and it is deep in our nature to do things together. View quote
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. View quote
Ward Cunningham
All the time we find ourselves in situations where people know things about the program, but they can't apply that knowledge to the program. Why? Because the knowledge runs counter to some organizational decision that was made before they had that knowledge. In other words, the program becomes resistant to that collection of knowledge. View quote
Ward Cunningham
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. View quote
Ward Cunningham
I love computer graphics, but every system I've seen to try to turn programming into pictures has lost that syntactic element. There's something about syntax that makes it very precise for reading. I love photography. A photograph will tell a story. But words tell a story even better. Words are more versatile. You can paint a verbal picture that's much richer than you can photograph. View quote
Ward Cunningham
If you write a lot of programs, and you're used to squeezing them all the time, you find that it's easy to write a program that's simple. A lot of it is having a clear sense of what you want to say - writing the proof by choosing what to prove, and being clear about that. In programming, a lot of simplicity comes from knowing what matters and what doesn't matter. (Ward Cunningham)
Let's not worry about what somebody reading the code tomorrow is going to think. Let's not worry about whether it's efficient. Let's not even worry about whether it will work. Let's just write the simplest thing that could possibly work. View quote
Ward Cunningham
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. View quote
Ward Cunningham
I actually enjoy complexity that's empowering. If it challenges me, the complexity is very pleasant. View quote
Ward Cunningham
It was a turning point in my programming career when I realized that I didn't have to win every argument. View quote
Ward Cunningham

Ward Cunningham

Ward Cunningham - Image
Photo: Wikimedia commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Born: May 26, 1949
Quotes count: 78
Wikipedia: Ward Cunningham

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