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The 3 Virtues of Good Programmers
Just don’t take them literally
Long ago, Perl creator Larry Wall named three tongue-in-cheek virtues of programmers: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Before you go trying to learn the latest programming languages and trendy frameworks to improve your craft, take a look at these three “virtues” and try to incorporate them in your daily work.
Just don’t take them literally!
Virtue #1: Laziness
It’s telling that computer science is the only field where “lazy” is a technical term.
Programmers have a lot of work to get done. Logically, the best way to address a large set of work tasks is to get rid of any of them that you don’t really need to do.
Next, try to get rid of any repetitive tasks. If there’s one thing we hate, it’s routine. We don’t want to repeat the same keystrokes if it’s possible to write a script to do it for us.
Why? Because we’re lazy — and that’s a good thing. Laziness is a result of our desire for efficiency.
In some cases, this can be a bit of a cultural miscommunication. Sometimes programmers are judged for how much code we produce. For managers from non-technical backgrounds, a programmer who works really hard to produce an enormous…
