The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty.
A wiki is a place to write in the same way that a party is a place to talk.
The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity.
Often as you move comments around and have similar comments adjacent to each other, you find that half of the words can be cut out. Because a sentence says it all if the sentence is in just the right place.
Everything is subject to refactoring.
I think we can become excellent predictors. It's just that we're careful not to depend upon prediction anymore than we have to.
To worry about tomorrow is to detract from your work today. Time you spend thinking about tomorrow is time you're not spending thinking about what to do today.
In creating wiki, I wanted to stroke that story-telling nature in all of us.
Taking it to the limit. And the fact that it actually holds up — and a lot of it improves — when taking it to the limit is why it should naturally be called "Extreme." Kent's single biggest contribution is being daring enough to say, "This is all that matters, and we should do it all the time."
Anonymity relieves refactoring friction. Have learned that people want to sign things. But try to write in a way where you don’t have to know who said it.
My specific purpose for the first wiki was to create an environment where we might link together each other's experience to discover the pattern language of programming.
I say, forget all that and ask yourself, "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"
People can and do trust works produced by people they don’t know. The real world is still trying to figure out how Wikipedia works.
I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter.
I'm not a fan of classification. It's very difficult to come up with a classification scheme that's useful when what you're most interested in is things that don't fit in, things that you didn't expect.
I actually enjoy complexity that's empowering. If it challenges me, the complexity is very pleasant.
Putting a new feature into a program is important, but refactoring so new features can be added in the future is equally important.
My hope is that wiki becomes a totem for a way of interacting with people.
I wanted to invent some software that was completely different, that would grow and change as it was used. That’s how wiki came about.
It was a turning point in my programming career when I realized that I didn't have to win every argument.
