Ward Cunningham: Try

Ward Cunningham is American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. Explore interesting quotes on try.
Ward Cunningham: 138   quotes 0   likes

“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.”

Ward Cunningham

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work
Context: The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn't the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. 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.

Love , World , Beauty , Understanding

“Anonymity relieves refactoring friction. Have learned that people want to sign things. But try to write in a way where you don’t have to know who said it.”

Ward Cunningham

Crucible of Creativity (2005)
Context: Anonymity relieves refactoring friction. Have learned that people want to sign things. But try to write in a way where you don’t have to know who said it. But when someone who is not in a giving mood uses anonymity (spammers), that abuse can drive us away from anonymity. But I hope we can drive the ill-intended out without having to give up the openness.

People , Way , Learning

“People can and do trust works produced by people they don’t know. The real world is still trying to figure out how Wikipedia works.”

Ward Cunningham

Crucible of Creativity (2005)
Context: People can and do trust works produced by people they don’t know. The real world is still trying to figure out how Wikipedia works. A fantastic resource. Open source is produced by people that you can’t track down, but you can trust it in very deep ways. People can trust works by people they don’t know in this low communication cost environment.

People , World

“A wiki is like a party that doesn't have to stop. It's a party that doesn't get crowded because new rooms appear when needed. It's a timeless party where you can try each conversation over and over until you get it right.”

Ward Cunningham

Foreword to Wikis for Dummies

Appearance

“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

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Exploring with Wiki

Question , Nature

“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.”

Ward Cunningham

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), To Plan or Not To Plan

Love , Reading , Painting

“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

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work

“What I'm really doing is I'm trying to preserve the right for a programmer to think while he's typing. If you feel that it’s not going well, you can stop and say 'What did I get wrong? Let me correct it.”

Ward Cunningham

Geek Noise (2004)

Feeling , Thinking

“You don't want to write a big comment that tells others how to make a change they might want to make, because you don't know what change they're going to want to make. Better to have the attitude that you can't help future programmers make their changes. All you can do is make it easy for them to understand what you were trying to do. And it will be easiest for them to understand what you were trying to do if you were very careful to not try to do too much.”

Ward Cunningham

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Working the Program

Understanding , Change , Future , Help

“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.”

Ward Cunningham

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text

Nature , Problem

“Over and over, people try to design systems that make tomorrow's work easy. But when tomorrow comes it turns out they didn't quite understand tomorrow's work, and they actually made it harder.”

Ward Cunningham

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Working the Program

People , Understanding

“When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing. So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right.”

Ward Cunningham

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text

“Often, the program ends up amazing. You'll say, "This is beautifully architected." Well, where did that architecture come from?
In this case, architecture means the systematic way we deal with diverse requirements. Architecture allows us, when we go to do work we need to do on the program, to find where things go. It is a system that was worked into the program by all the little decisions we made — little decisions that were right, and little decisions that were wrong and corrected. In a sense we get the architecture without really trying. All the decisions in the context of the other decisions simply gel into an architecture.”

Ward Cunningham

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Working the Program

Way , Decision , Sense