Good lazy and bad lazy

First of all this all comes from Larry Wall, yes the guy that made perl. In one of his many books, he said this.

“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” — LarryWall, ProgrammingPerl (1st edition), OreillyAndAssociates
quote stolen from here

Now the concept in question is defined by Larry as follows

Laziness

The quality that makes you go to
great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write
labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document
what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.
Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book.
See also impatience and hubris. (p.609)

I agree 100% here, programmers are lazy, my rule of thumb is that if you have to do something twice the second one will be a script or program, or if the task is so huge and repetitive I won’t wait until the first manual run.

Now what’s this about good vs bad, it’s a two side story. Good lazy is what Larry defined, nothing more,Bad lazy on the other hand is divided in 2

1. People that don’t understand the laziness virtue
2. Lazy people that think that’s a good thing.

From those #1 is the most problematic since they think that by being lazy (not doing anything for example) they are following Larry’s path, this kind of people is the one you have to turn your back and run, this is the kind that goes to the net downloads some code, doesn’t understands it and asks you to “help them” modify it to do something else (which most of the time is homework), they may be hope for some of them but beware they can be very time consuming always know went to stop trying to safe them.

But #2 is the worst being lazy is the best thing you could be, just because after your done being lazy you haven’t accomplish anything and your X amount of hours older

So why I wrote this? well I got quoted by warchief and for some reason people keep misquoting me on this so here is a reference.

Anyway stop your bad lazy reading stuff on the internet and go do something that express your good laziness.