is laziness a programer's virtue?

[Xah Lee]

Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall

Xah Lee, 20021124

In the unix community there's quite a large confusion and wishful
thinking about the word laziness. In this post, i'd like to make some
clarifications.

American Heritage Dictionary third edition defines laziness as:
“Resistant to work or exertion; disposed to idleness.”

When the sorcerer Larry Wall said “The three chief virtues of a
programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris”, he used the word
“laziness” to loosely imply “natural disposition that results in being
economic”. As you can see now, “Resistant to work or exertion” is
clearly not positive and not a virtue, but “natural disposition that
results in economy” is a good thing if true.

When Larry Wall said one of programer's virtue is laziness, he wants
the unix morons to conjure up in their brains the following
proposition as true: “Resistant to work or exertion is a natural human
disposition and such disposition actually results behaviors being
economic”. This statement may be true, which means that human laziness
may be intuitively understood from evolution. However, this statement
is a proposition on all human beings, and is not some “virtue” that
can be applied to a group of people such as programers.

Demagogue Larry Wall is smart in creating a confusion combined with
wishful thinking. By making subtle statements like this, he semi-
intentionally confuses average programers to think that it is OK to be
not thorough, it is OK to be sloppy, it is OK to disparage computer
science. (like the incompetent unixers and perlers are)

Can you see the evil and its harm in not understanding things clearly?
This laziness quote by Wall is a tremendous damage to the computing
industry. It is a source among others that spurs much bad fashion
trends and fuckups in the industry. It is more damaging than any
single hack or virus. It is social brain-washing at work, like the
diamond company De Beers' tremendously successful sales slogan: “A
Diamond is Forever” or Apple's grammatically fantastic “Think
Different”.

The most fundamental explanation of why Larry Wall's sophistry are
damaging to society is simply this: What he said is not true and they
are widely spread and conceived as worthwhile. This is a form of mis-
information. This is a manifestation of Love without Knowledge as i
expounded before, with subtle but disastrous consequences (already).

[DISCLAIMER: all mentions of real persons are opinion only.]

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  Xah
  xah at xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/