Ward Cunningham | |
---|---|
Born | Howard G. Cunningham May 26, 1949 Michigan City, Indiana, U.S. |
Alma mater | Purdue University |
Occupation | Computer programmer |
Years active | 1984–present |
Known for | WikiWikiWeb, the first implementation of a wiki The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (document) |
Call sign | K9OX |
Howard G. Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki [1] [2] and was a co-author of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development . Termed a pioneer, [3] and innovator, [1] [2] he also helped create both software design patterns and extreme programming. He began coding the WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on c2.com (the website of his software consulting firm) on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He co-authored (with Bo Leuf) a book about wikis, entitled The Wiki Way , and invented the Framework for Integrated Test.
Cunningham was a keynote speaker at the first three instances of the WikiSym conference series on wiki research and practice, and also at the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017. [4] He was a keynote speaker at the MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2024. [5]
Cunningham was born in Michigan City, Indiana, on May 26, 1949. [6] He grew up in Highland, Indiana, where he completed high school. [7]
Cunningham received his bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary engineering (electrical engineering and computer science) and his master's degree in computer science from Purdue University, graduating in 1978. [8] He is a co-founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, a software consultancy he started with his wife. [9]
Cunningham has also served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principal Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. He is founder of The Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern Languages of Programming conference which it sponsors.
Cunningham was part of the Smalltalk community.
From December 2003 until October 2005, Cunningham worked for Microsoft in the "Patterns & Practices" group. From October 2005 to May 2007, he held the position of Director of Committer Community Development at the Eclipse Foundation. In May 2009, he joined AboutUs as its chief technology officer. [3] [10] On March 24, 2011 The Oregonian reported that Cunningham had departed AboutUs to join the Venice Beach-based CitizenGlobal, a startup working on crowd-sourced video content, as their chief technology officer and the Co-Creation Czar. [11] He remains "an adviser" with AboutUs. [12] [13] In April 2013, Cunningham left CitizenGlobal to work as a programmer at New Relic. [14]
Cunningham is well known for a few widely disseminated ideas which he originated and developed. The most famous among these are the wiki and many ideas in the field of software design patterns, made popular by the Gang of Four (GoF). He owns the company Cunningham & Cunningham Inc., a consultancy that has specialized in object-oriented programming. He coined the concept of technical debt and expanded on the idea in 1992. [15] [16] He created the site (and software) WikiWikiWeb, the first internet wiki, in 1995.
In 2001, he signed the Manifesto for Agile Software Development as a co-author. [17] [ better source needed ]
When asked in a 2006 interview with internetnews.com whether he considered patenting the wiki concept, he explained that he thought the idea "just sounded like something that no one would want to pay money for." [18]
Cunningham is interested in tracking the number and location of wiki page edits as a sociological experiment and may even consider the degradation of a wiki page as part of its process to stability. "There are those who give and those who take. You can tell by reading what they write." [19]
In 2011, Cunningham created Smallest Federated Wiki, a tool for wiki federation, which applies aspects of software development such as forking to wiki pages.
Cunningham has contributed to the practice of object-oriented programming, in particular the use of pattern languages and (with Kent Beck) the class-responsibility-collaboration cards. He also contributes to the extreme programming software development methodology. Much of this work was done collaboratively on the first wiki site.
Cunningham is credited with the idea: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." [20] This refers to the observation that people are quicker to correct a wrong answer than to answer a question. According to Steven McGeady, Cunningham advised him of this on a whim in the early 1980s, and McGeady dubbed this Cunningham's Law. [21] Although originally referring to interactions on Usenet, the law has been used to describe how other online communities work, such as Wikipedia. [22] Cunningham relativises his ownership of the law, calling it a "misquote that disproves itself by propagating through the internet" and by saying that he "never suggested asking questions by posting wrong answers". [23]
The idea is humorously and approvingly caricatured in xkcd illustration number 386, "Duty Calls". [24]
Cunningham lives in Beaverton, Oregon. [14] He holds an amateur radio extra class license issued by the Federal Communications Commission. His call sign is K9OX. [25] [26] [27] [28]
Cunningham is Nike's first "Code for a Better World" Fellow. [29]
Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding document for agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test-Driven Development (TDD), of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.
UseModWiki is a wiki software written in Perl and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Wikipedias in English and many other languages were powered by UseModWiki until switching to MediaWiki.
A wiki is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
The WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham and it has been a read-only archive since 2015. The name WikiWikiWeb originally also applied to the wiki software that operated the website, which was later renamed to "WikiBase".
The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web is a 2001 book about wikis by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham.
In computer programming, a code smell is any characteristic in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem. Determining what is and is not a code smell is subjective, and varies by language, developer, and development methodology.
The Portland Pattern Repository (PPR) is an online repository for computer programming software design patterns. It was accompanied by the website WikiWikiWeb, the world's first wiki. The repository has an emphasis on Extreme Programming, and is hosted by Cunningham & Cunningham (C2) of Portland, Oregon. The PPR's motto is "People, Projects & Patterns".
James O. Coplien, also known as Cope, is a writer, lecturer, and researcher in the field of computer science. He held the 2003–4 Vloeberghs Leerstoel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and has been a visiting professor at University of Manchester.
Tektronix, historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent company, it is now a subsidiary of Fortive, a spinoff from Danaher Corporation.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction is a 1977 book on architecture, urban design, and community livability. It was authored by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with writing credits also to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. Decades after its publication, it is still one of the best-selling books on architecture.
John Matthew Vlissides was a software engineer known mainly as one of the four authors of the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Vlissides referred to himself as "#4 of the Gang of Four and wouldn't have it any other way".
Steven McGeady is a former Intel executive best known as a witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial. His notes and testimony contained colorful quotes by Microsoft executives threatening to "cut off Netscape's air supply" and Bill Gates' guess that "this antitrust thing will blow over". Attorney David Boies said that McGeady's testimony showed him to be "an extremely conscientious, capable and honest witness", while Microsoft portrayed him as someone with an "axe to grind". McGeady left Intel in 2000, but later again gained notoriety for defending his former employee Mike Hawash after his arrest on federal terrorism charges. From its founding in 2002 until its sale in November 2013, he was Chairman of Portland-based healthcare technology firm ShiftWise. He is a member of the Reed College Board of Trustees, the Portland Art Museum Board of Trustees, and the PNCA Board of Governors, and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Randall Patrick Munroe is an American cartoonist, author, and engineer best known as the creator of the webcomic xkcd. Munroe has worked full-time on the comic since late 2006. In addition to publishing a book of the webcomic's strips, titled xkcd: Volume 0, he has written four books: What If?, Thing Explainer, How To, and What If? 2.
xkcd, sometimes styled XKCD, is a serial webcomic created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe. The comic's tagline describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". Munroe states on the comic's website that the name of the comic is not an initialism but "just a word with no phonetic pronunciation".
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
The Universal Edit Button is a browser extension that provides a green pencil icon in the address bar of a web browser that indicates that a web page on the World Wide Web is editable. It is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon that indicates that there is a web feed available. Clicking the icon opens the edit window. It was invented by a collaborative team of wiki enthusiasts, including Ward Cunningham, Jack Herrick, and many others.
The Hillside Group is an educational nonprofit organization founded in August 1993 to help software developers analyze and document common development and design problems as software design patterns. The Hillside Group supports the patterns community through sponsorship of the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences.
Software archaeology or source code archeology is the study of poorly documented or undocumented legacy software implementations, as part of software maintenance. Software archaeology, named by analogy with archaeology, includes the reverse engineering of software modules, and the application of a variety of tools and processes for extracting and understanding program structure and recovering design information. Software archaeology may reveal dysfunctional team processes which have produced poorly designed or even unused software modules, and in some cases deliberately obfuscatory code may be found. The term has been in use for decades.
Specification by example (SBE) is a collaborative approach to defining requirements and business-oriented functional tests for software products based on capturing and illustrating requirements using realistic examples instead of abstract statements. It is applied in the context of agile software development methods, in particular behavior-driven development. This approach is particularly successful for managing requirements and functional tests on large-scale projects of significant domain and organisational complexity.
Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
n.b. named after Ward Cunningham, a colleague of mine at Tektronix. This was his advice to me in the early 1980s with reference to what was later dubbed USENET, but since generalized to the Web and the Internet as a whole. Ward is now famous as the inventor of the Wiki. Ironically, Wikipedia is now perhaps the most widely-known proof of Cunningham's Law.