Gunjan Doshi

Ward Cunningham in his interview was asked, if he has any advise for a young programmer who inspires to become a great programmer?

Ward reply “One of the hardest things to pick up I think is that the way to grab hold of the really good ideas. There are a lot of ideas, but really good ideas are hard to snatch because they look so humble when you first see them. You expect the solution to be beautifully complex and a good solution is pretty plain until you see how that plainness plays in a complicated way to make something better than you could get in your head all at once”.

I feel there is a lot to learn, from what Ward said. Pretty plain solutions, as Ward calls them, are very rare. For e.g. I have been told that the first Wiki was just few lines of code! Today, Wiki is a crucial collaborative tool. I have also studied FIT’s source code. I was shocked to see its simplicity.

I feel the significance and respect given to beautifully crafted complex solutions, which only an elite few can understand, has taken us away from the pretty plain ideas. Strict adherence to XP’s principles of ‘You aren’t gonna need it’ and ‘Do the simplest thing that could possibly work’ can definitely help us. In addition, the continuous team retrospectives of ‘Is our code better than yesterday’ can help the whole team keep an eye on simple design.

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