Ward Cunningham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Howard G. Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is a computer programmer and is best known as the prime inventor of WikiWikiWeb and one of the pioneers in patterns and Extreme Programming. He founded the first wiki site, at the Portland Pattern Repository, on March 25, 1995. Cunningham, known in some software circles simply as Ward, currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Contents |
Personal history
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. He is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. He 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 Programs conference which it sponsors. Ward was part of the Smalltalk community.
From December 2003 until October 2005 he worked for Microsoft in the "patterns & practices" group.
As of October 2005, he is the Director of Committer Community Development at the Eclipse Foundation.
Ideas and inventions
Cunningham is well-known for a few widely disseminated ideas which he originated and developed. Among these, the most famous are the wiki (originally wikiwiki), and many patterns in the field of software patterns, including the collection of patterns that later became known as "Extreme Programming" or "XP."
Wiki development
Cunningham states that the wiki concept came to him in the late 1980s, and he implemented it first in a HyperCard stack. He is the co-author (with Bo Leuf) of the book The Wiki Way (2001).
Patterns and Extreme Programming
Cunningham is also well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming: in particular, the use of pattern languages, and CRC (Class-Responsibility-Collaboration) cards (with Kent Beck). He is also a significant contributor to Extreme Programming, a software development methodology. A great deal of this work was carried out in the first wiki site itself. His most famous quote is probably, "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"
