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Interview With Ward Cunningham
CowboyRobot writes "Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki, wrote the Fit test framework, is the co-inventor of CRC cards, and is now promoting the concept of technical debt. He recently won the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award and was interviewed by that publication. 'The creator of the Wiki dishes on the Wiki, Wikipedia's policies, OO design, technical debt, CoffeeScript and Perl, how to survive as a veteran programmer, and doing the simplest thing that could possibly work.' Cunningham is given the chance to explain his philosophy of coding: 'I like the picture and I like the look of the code. It's only 40 lines, but every line carried some careful thought. There was a learning curve there that surprised me because the programs looked short. The most rewarding work I've done this year is digging through that code and understanding what it does and understanding what it didn't do, and how to approach the problem.'"
If you're a software developer and you haven't read Ward's Wiki, I strongly advise doing so now. It has a lot of content from some very smart people you won't get elsewhere. Primarily it focuses on software design patterns, but even outside of that subject I've learned a lot just by reading random pages there.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
No.
This is one of those Zen master questions, the usefulness of application depends on the person answering the question.
For the average worker bee, the simplest thing that could work is copying and pasting code from somewhere else in the project, or from the web. Then stripping out the error handling and anything else that they don't understand.
What are they referring to here? This seems like a quote pulled out of context and now it makes no sense.
"It's only 40 lines, but every line carried some careful thought. "
Anyone who claims someone other than Ward Cunningham invented the wiki is a complete idiot. There are some inventions where it is debatable who got there first, the Wiki is not one of them. I mean, he coined the term when he invented it, so if someone claims they invented the wiki, they're obviously lying since they would call it something else. The only person I've ever seen the invention of the wiki misattributed to is Jimmy Wales, and that's only by really stupid people who don't know the difference between a wiki and Wikipedia. But in any event, he's an American.
Don't confuse him with Ward Christensen, another early computer networking pioneer. I wonder how many people ask Cunningham about his invention of the BBS and the invention of xmodem.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I met him at Dorkbot PDX, where he often demonstrates some thing he invented that has the hardcore programmers and robot builders scratching their heads. Those of us with slightly less technical knowledge are usually completely baffled.
Ward Cunningham is, of course, the Amalgam universe father of Richibeave Cunningham, a young ginger who gets into trouble dippint the girls' pigtails into ink wells, and who hangs out with his ne'er-do-well friend Wallonzie.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The article didn't cover any of his work with the agile methodology community and his role as one of the three inventors (with Kent Beck and Ron Jeffries) of the eXtreme Programming (XP) methodology and the practices surrounding it (many of which were used in agile methodologies other than XP). To me that's a lot more important than CRC cards.
But, having known Ward for a very long time, I think his most notable contribution is his being a nice guy - humble as well as brilliant, and always willing to share. He is one of the unsung geniuses of the computing world and deserves a lot more attention than he normally gets.
That is all.
Didn't he marry Marion Cleaver?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The key is what he says next:
I will admit that I was a Smalltalk zealot, and I believed that Smalltalk could be the only language, and I knew about a dozen reasons why, and one of them was that once everybody programmed in Smalltalk, we would all communicate with objects. But that didn't happen. And the day that I gave up on that vision, I said, "You know what, we're all going to communicate with text files. We're all going to go ripping through these text files plundering them for whatever information we can infer from it." That's when I picked up Perl. And it shocked me, just how well it worked for finding and plundering files because it had those reg exes built in and stuff like that. And it was so fast. It was fast to compile, it was fast to develop, it was fast to run. I could not believe it was so fast. And I know people like to complain about it, but I also thought it showed a tremendous amount of insight. It was insight, and I looked at it and I said, "Who would have thought of making a language like that?" That's when I realized that open source was here to stay. There is no commercial endeavor that ever would have invented Perl.
Same thing applies.
It's a damn shame this article isn't wikified; it's in desperate need of editing.