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Father of Wiki Speaks on Collaborative Development
An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting that Ward Cunningham, creator of the wiki, has predicted an encouraging future for open source and collaborative development. From the article: "Cunningham, who is director of committer community development at the Eclipse Foundation, said open-source software will continue to grow and thrive because it enables user innovation. '[...] No end user wants to be a programmer; they just want to get their jobs done,' he said. But more and more people with powerful tools and powerful languages will be able to work together to build better systems, he said."
Here's an interesting quote from the article: ... Microsoft has to be more cautious. And IBM has to be more cautious. Even as a developer in the Eclipse foundation there's a certain amount of busy work that a developer has to do, like keeping an intellectual property log and stuff like that. But this is what you have to do."
"(Microsoft) has to inch toward this community style development, otherwise it would be irresponsible to their stock holders," Cunningham said. "What they do and say is in the best interest of their stockholders.
I thought this was an interesting angle arguing for OSS. I think many times OSS'ers seem too anti-corporate (myself included) to have thought of this angle.
I must say that I lost a very tiny bit of respect for him when he said that he "has nothing but respect for Microsoft", but my respect was pretty high to begin with so he didn't go down too far.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
The conundrum is that end users want to consume something that is already available, but do not want to create it themselves. Once they decide to contribute, they cease being end users and become creators. If what he says is true, the shaolin and the wu-tang could be dangerous. Creators are a different breed than end users, though, of course, the two overlap considerably. However, if we want to say that end users don't want 'to program', then why would we assume that they want to contribute as well?
Reality, of course, provides the evidence that what he says is false. People are not only happy to consume others' works, but also motivated to create their own works. Whether their own works are frivolous opinions or heavy-duty scholarly works, people are motivated to create by the same desire they have to procreate. Since computer geeks are somewhat stunted in their ability to do the latter due to emotional and mental disabilities, they seek their immortality by creating very public works such as articles on Wikipedia, Open Source applications, and (godhelpme) posts on Slashdot.
Programmers are end users as well. I see a trend of allowing more and more advaced programming concepts to creep into content creation programs to allow finer control of the end result.
-John Fenley
Under this definition, anyone who writes anything of any complexity in a modern wordprocessor is a programmer. Modern WP packages can be regarded as shells in which the operator enters instructions (literal formatting commands, such as right-justify, or bold), decisions (floating tables, grammar/spellcheck), loops/recursion (automatic table of contents, automatic indexing), etc. On WP's like Wordperfect, you could actually make all of the commands visible. It frightened users to do that, because it showed just how much coding they were actually doing.
The power of high-level tools, then, is not to help the user avoid programming, it is to help the user avoid seeing what they're programming. It isn't to do the user's work for them, it is to allow the user to sidestep their phobias long enough to get the work done.
One of the follies of fourth- and fifth-generation programming languages was the assumption that programmers wanted their programming hidden from them as well. It is certainly true that software designers need to have a high level of abstraction, as they don't need to know the details (and shouldn't). It is also true that there are special cases in programming where you need minor scripting changes to have a big impact on the end result. In these cases, high level programming is entirely correct. The rest of the time, when details are everything, you don't want any more abstraction than you can possibly get away with.
For end-users, though, applications really need to be extremely high-level programming languages and very little more. That is why Word (which is essentially a scripting engine with a bunch of macros pre-programmed in) is useful to end-users, even though AmiPro is technically superior and Ventura Publisher is much more impressive. Word is a programming tool that can do anything Visual Basic can do, whereas the others are only applications. The user may claim to hate programming, but they can claim it all they like. The fact remains that they pick the programming tool over the "pure" application - when it is disguised cleverly enough.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Ward talks about how he used hypercard to create his first draft of the wiki... hypercard was very easy to use and its sad to notice how apple failed to notice its potential. For those wanting to try a new hypercard-like environment with all the bells and whistles we come to take as granted such as network support, rdbms support, multimedia, point your browsers to Runtime Revolution http://www.runrev.com/> a wonderful tool. It's also cross platfrom, write your stacks once, build to win32, macs, linux, freebsd, solaris. PS: actually I coded a simple wiki in rev in about 30 lines. And it is graphical! :-)
Cheers folks
-- Por mais que eu ande no vale das trevas e da morte, meu PowerMac G4 Não Travará!!!
Ask most wiki users what a wiki is, and they'll say something like, "It's a platform for collaborative writing." That's mainly what it's used for of course, but that's not what it is. Cunningham's original definition is much better: "The simplest database possible." And that's the concept's main virtue, simplicty. I do wish people would bear that in mind when they decide to use a wiki for something — especially when it's something that'd be better done another way.