is laziness a programer's virtue?

[John Thingstad]

On Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:25:19 +0200, Xah Lee <xah at xahlee.org> wrote:

> 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.”
>

In this context I think you can safely take it to mean:
Don't work hard, work smart.

Avoid repetitious work. If somthing seems to elaborate find a more  
efficient way.

In a course I took on verifiable programming I found working with Hoare  
logic
extremely tedious. So I started using rewriting loops as recursive  
procedures and
using induction instead. It took about a quarter of the time as the  
invariant of a loop
fell out rather naturally this way. I failed the course, but when I took  
the course
over again a year later I noticed that the book had been rewritten and now  
half the book
was dedicated to Generator Induction. (Seems the professor noticed I  
failed in a interesting
way and figured out it was not so stupid after all.) Naturally I had no  
problems the second time ;)

This is just one example but it should convey the idea.

-- 
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/