Ward Cunningham Quotes

“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.”

“Each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected. You can call it beautiful code when the code also makes it look like the language was made for the problem.”

“I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it.”

“I don't claim to be a methodologist, but I act like one only because I do methodology to protect myself from crazy methodologists.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.”

“The blogosphere is a community that might produce a work. Whereas a wiki is a work that might produce a community. It’s all just people communicating.”

“The shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn't generally pass through meeting expectations.”

“The web has been an experiment in anonymity.”

“There's been an awful lot of discussion about what is or isn't simple, and people have gotten a pretty sophisticated notion of simplicity, but I'm not sure it has helped.”

“What is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.”

“What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?”

“When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.”

“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.”