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Java Forum / General / April 2007is laziness a programer's virtue?
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.] ---- This post is archived at: http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/perl_laziness.html Xah xah@xahlee.org ∑ http://xahlee.org/ > Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall > 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”. Programming by definition is the process of automating repetitive actions to reduce the human effort required to perform them. A good programmer faced with a hard problem always looks for ways to make his|her job easier by delegating work to a computer. That's what Larry means. Automation is MUCH more effective than repetition.  SignatureDan www.prairienet.org/~dsb/ >> Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall >> When the sorcerer Larry Wall said âThe three chief virtues of a [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > his|her job easier by delegating work to a computer. That's what > Larry means. Automation is MUCH more effective than repetition. Indeed. A programmer is someone who, after doing similar tasks by hand a few times, writes a program to do it. This extends to programming tasks, so after writing similar programs a few times, a (good) programmer will use programming to make writing future similar programs easier. This can be by abstracting the essence of the task into library functions so new programs are just sequences of parameterized calls to these, or it can be by writing a program generator (such as a parser generator) or it can be by designing a domain-specific language and writing a compiler or interpreter for this. Torben You fail to understand the difference between passive laziness and active laziness. Passive laziness is what most people have. It's active laziness that is the virtue. It's the desire to go out and / make sure/ that you can be lazy in the future by spending just a little time writing a script now. It's thinking about time economically and acting on it. +--------------- | You fail to understand the difference between passive laziness and | active laziness. Passive laziness is what most people have. It's | active laziness that is the virtue. It's the desire to go out and / | make sure/ that you can be lazy in the future by spending just a | little time writing a script now. It's thinking about time | economically and acting on it. +--------------- Indeed. See Robert A. Heinlein's short story (well, actually just a short section of his novel "Time Enough For Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long") entitled "The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail". It's about a man who hated work so much that he worked very, *very* hard so he wouldn't have to do any (and succeeded). -Rob ----- Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org> 627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/> San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607 > +--------------- > | You fail to understand the difference between passive laziness and [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > Fail". It's about a man who hated work so much that he worked > very, *very* hard so he wouldn't have to do any (and succeeded). You can also argue that the essence of progress is someone saying "Hey, there must be an easier way to do this!". Torben > Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall > [quoted text clipped - 52 lines] > x...@xahlee.org > ∑http://xahlee.org/ I like Larry Wall, despite being not a Perl programmer, and when he secretly subverts the american, protestant working ethos I like him even better :) > Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall > [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > 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. SignatureUsing Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/ > Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall > [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > thinking about the word laziness. In this post, i'd like to make some > clarifications. Years ago I used to work with someone who used to say 'I'm a lazy person - I like to do things the easy way!'. I guess this is what Larry Wall means. Jim Ford > Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall > [quoted text clipped - 53 lines] > xah@xahlee.org > ∑ http://xahlee.org/ Laziness is re-posting something dated 2002. Of course, for functional languages, 'lazy' means something rather different... Some entity, AKA dbenson@eecs.wsu.edu, wrote this mindboggling stuff: (selectively-snipped-or-not-p) > Of course, for functional languages, 'lazy' means something rather > different... lazy means: just get a post-grad to do the grunt-work for free. Cor SignatureThe biggest problem LISP has is that it does not appeal to dumb people If this failed to satisfy you try reading the Hyper-Spec or woman frig (defvar MyComputer '((OS . "GNU/Emacs") (IPL . "GNU/Linux"))) Read the mailpolicy before mailing http://www.clsnet.nl/mail.html Blatherskite! http://innovators.vassar.edu/innovator.html?id=8 http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/comment/2160655/laziness-mother-invention Free MagazinesGet these publications absolutely FREE for up to 12 months. 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