Ask HN: Help me prepare for my interview with Ward Cunningham | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help me prepare for my interview with Ward Cunningham

30 pointsmilesf15 comments

I've scored an interview with Ward Cunningham for an upcoming Pragmatic Podcast, and would really like help from the Hacker News community. I've always loved the questions that get asked here.

If you could ask Ward Cunningham a question, what would it be?

If I use your question, I'll credit the submitter in the show notes.

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For those like me, wondering (no disrespect) who Ward Canningham is:

Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham (commonly known by its domain name, c2.com), on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon and is the chief technology officer for AboutUs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

If you have time, go for a walkabout here:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors

It's the progenitor Wiki.

Thanks. I'll be reviewing that page as well as many other old interviews.

When I met Ward, I asked him if he'd ever used a wiki. His immediate facial expression was impossible to transcribe.

I usually collect questions using an EtherPad that I tweet out http://titanpad.com/qVBi1QngeR

Really surprised to see my old method outperforming HN.

There's something surprising about a collaborative content editing web application outperforming a point-moderated content system when your subject is the inventor of the former? :)

Ward's been around while. (See my other comment about the progenitor wiki.) He's actually in a position to talk about interesting historical perspectives, like the rise and fall of Smalltalk. (The same for Patterns, come to think of it.)

One thing I've heard about Ward, is that he has an uncanny ability to learn something positive in any situation. Where others come away with annoyance or frustration, he'll come away with a keen insight.

How about: what would be 'simplest thing that could possibly work' if one were implementing a new government for an existing nation-state?

For what time period? Dictatorships often work well, if the requirements are reduced to a time span of just a few years and personal freedom is not a part of the spec.

Sure, I'd call that a valid point.

Replacing one dictatorship with another has significant historical president, and might be very simple if everyone agrees on who should be in charge. One might argue, though, that if the new regime needs to actively suppress an oppositional group, by any means, then the solution might no longer qualify as simple.

your question already artificially narrows down the space of possibilities to "a nation-state must have a new government" and "the simplest is better". Why not try to think outside of centralized hierarchical paradigm? What about distributed approach? For example of peer-to-peer kind?

Do you think automated functional testing (in the style of Fit) is catching on? What is getting in the way?

How about this -

What new technology or methodology do you see that might have a big impact on future software development? Like object-oriented programming, concurrent programming, functional programming and Agile methodologies had in past decades.

1/ How are wikis doing today?

2/ What is the future of wikis?

3/ How are you involved?

vi or emacs?

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