Back in 2004 I stumbled upon the ShortestWikiContest. I immediately ignored my work, family, and sleep to write the shortest wiki I could. The goal was to honor at least the minimal set of WikiPrinciples with the shortest functional program you can get working in whatever programming language you choose.
It feels like weeks but I bet it was only a few days of battle. Several of us kept pushing ahead with shorter implementations. We kept inspring each other until, one day, I had achieved victory. My beautiful creation was SigWik, the Signature Wiki. Spaning just four lines and weighing in at a beautifully symmetrical 222 characters, SigWik is the smallest wiki software in the world. Here she is:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI':all';path_info=~/\w+/;$_=`grep -l $& *`.h1($&).escapeHTML$t=param(t)
||`dd<$&`;open F,">$&";print F$t;s/htt\S+|([A-Z]\w+){2,}/a{href,$&},$&/eg;
print header,pre"$_<form>",submit,textarea t,$t,9,70
It was about a year later that I went to work for a company with a significantly larger wiki software. Several more years went by and I was asked by Ward Cunningham if he could use my wiki implementation as an example of the fundamentals of a wiki. Here it is in action, with minor edits by Ward for readability:
I’ve always been proud of this little wiki. It’s served so many good uses.
The thing that most impressed me about SigWiki was that it wasn’t hard to figure out (once I added line breaks at the obvious places). I was a little nervous when I saw that he was using ‘dd’, a magtape utility left over from the ’70s. Then I realized he was using it as a ‘cat’ substitute because the name was one character shorter.
at 11:22 am on February 27th, 2008