"You are always taught to do as much as you can. Always put checks in. Always look for exceptions. Always handle the most general case. Always give the user the best advice. Always print a meaningful error message. Always this. Always that. You have so many things in the background that youre supposed to do, theres no room left to think. I say, forget all that and ask yourself, "Whats the simplest thing that could possibly work?" I think the advice got turned into a command: "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work." Thats a little more confusing, because there isnt this notion that as soon as youve done it, well evaluate it."
Howard G. Cunningham is an American computer programmer, who developed the first wiki and co-authored the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Called a pioneer, and innovator, he also helped create both software design patterns and extreme programming. He began coding the WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on c2.com on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He co-
"There is a programming smell here… which is kind of like the smell in your refrigerator, you know. Theres a sign that theres something wrong, but you cant quite put your finger on it. But you know if you leave it there, its only going to get worse."
"Why have a locked wiki when you can instead just post static Web pages?"
"I love computer graphics, but every system Ive seen to try to turn programming into pictures has lost that syntactic element. Theres 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 thats much richer than you can photograph."
"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. On Wards wiki, the process has been called "refactoring," which is what we call the process in software. Wards wiki is about software and it has software people on it, so they call it refactoring. Anyplace else it would probably be called editing. So on Wards wiki, refactoring is an ongoing process. The assumption is that when something turns out to not be ideal, it will be refactored again. Everything is subject to refactoring."
"It was a turning point in my programming career when I realized that I didnt have to win every argument. Id be talking about code with someone, and Id say, "I think the best way to do it is A." And theyd say, "I think the best way to do it is B. Id say, "Well no, its really A." And theyd say, "Well, we want to do B." It was a turning point for me when I could say, "Fine. Do B. Its not going to hurt us that much if Im wrong. Its not going to hurt us that much if Im right and you do B, because, we can correct mistakes. So lets find out if its a mistake."
"When people work code they can often see things I set out to do that they wouldnt notice otherwise. And there are no obligations to say, "Ward youre brilliant," but sometimes they say, "Ward youre brilliant." And that strokes my ego. Pride of ownership? You bet."
"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"