Cannot Afford To Make A Mistake

When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing.  So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right.

-- Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (26 May 1949-), computer programmer, inventor of the first wiki, (WikiWikiWeb, now called WardsWiki), and pioneer of software design patterns and Extreme Programming, "Collective Ownership of Code and Text : A Conversation with Ward Cunningham" Part II (1 December 2003), interview by Bill Venners