Interview With Ward Cunningham 31
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.'"
re "The simplest thing that could possibly work" (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Don't confuse with Ward Christensen (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
His conversion from being a Smalltalk zealot (Score:4, Insightful)