is laziness a programer's virtue?

[Xah Lee]

Dear Ken,

I want to thank you for your spirit in supporting and leading the lisp
community, in spreading lisp the language both in what you have done
technically as well as evangelization, as well as the love and
knowledge attitude towards newsgroup communities in general, in part
thru your numerous replies to my posts in the past years. (as opposed
to, the motherfucking pack of driveling and fuckface ignoramuses that
are predominate personalities in newsgroups, including some of the
fucking asshole intolerant bigwigs in the lisp newsgroup who think
themselves as the holder of justice and goodness (which has
contributed significantly to the stagnation of lisp).)

Thank you.

For those reading this, i also want to mention, that although i think
Perl is a motherfucking language on earth, and its leader and
“inventor” Larry Wall has done massive damage to the computing world,
but Perl the community is in fact very tolerant in general (which is
to Larry's credit), when compared to the motherfucking Pythoners (who
knew SHIT) as well as many of the self-appointed lisp bigwig
characters.

[disclaimer: my statement about Larry Wall is opinion only.]

With Knowledge, and, Love.

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

On Apr 15, 10:36 am, Ken Tilton <k... at theoryyalgebra.com> wrote:
> XahLeewrote:
> > Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall
>
> >XahLee, 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.
>
> Xah, you are losing your sense of humor. Wall listed the usually
> pejorative "lazy" as a virtue simply to grab the reader, make them
> think, and simply to entertain better. Surely The GreatXahunderstands
> the virtue of flamboyant writing and does not want every word yanked
> from context and slid under the microscope for dissection.
>
> kzo