Somehow I came across this gem. The Three Virtues of Programming:
- Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.
- Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy.
- Hubris: Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about.
I agree.
you did *not* know that? :)
It ois a quote from larry wall, he has a whole essay named ‘lazyness, impatience, hubris’ that you can find online. And it is a really pleasant experience.
Actually, it seem all the scripting language designers make great presentations and papers :)
Well, it would make sense that Larry would be a n accomplished writer/communicator… his background is actually in linguistics. :) (This goes a long way toward explaining the… uniquely “interesting” relationship Perl has with things like grammar and parsing. And why it’s so good at what it does!)
For the original author, Larry’s take on the Three Virtues of a good coder, and further (important) discussion on the finer points of “true” vs. “false” laziness, appears in detail in the introductory chapters of the “Programming Perl” O’Reilly book. (Bonus points if you can track down an ancient 1st edition copy. The first version of the book was actually a damn good read, for a reference tome.)