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Laziness to me is thinking "Eh this doesn't need tests" or "It might be possible to break it this way but I doubt anyone will try that" What people seem to mea
by Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Laziness to me is thinking "Eh this doesn't need tests" or "It might be possible to break it this way but I doubt anyone will try that"
What people seem to mean by it is the ability to stop and think "This task is repetitive and tedious, we are passing the threshold where writing an automatic solution is faster than manually completing the task" I'm not sure what word would really describe this though "Efficient" probably.
- MereInterest 6y agoI think it is laziness, but the appropriate kind. I am willing to work harder now, in order to be lazy later. I am so lazy, I do not ever want to manually test a function. Therefore, I write automated tests to enable my laziness. I am so lazy, I do not want to remember caveats on how a function works. Therefore, I do my best to make an interface be hard to use incorrectly.
- treeman79 6y agoThis is the correct sort of laziness.
- worldsayshi 6y agoWell this kind of laziness seldom comes at an advantage in the modern workplace? I mean there's always more work so working hard now doesn't equate to working less later. Unless you're an entrepreneur building your own product.
- chillfox 6y agoSure it does. If you work with people who don't automate then every time you finish a piece of automation you can slow down your pace a little and still be faster than the people doing stuff manually.
- p_l 6y agoThe reward of work well done is more work and shorter deadlines, something well known as early as 1987. At some point you stop trusting that you can spend time on making better tools and just surrender to the tedium.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoThe thing with tests is that the effect is indirect, and you won't really realize how much time is not wasted down the line. That time could apply to your whole department / the people you work with. In worst cases, that time is saved by there not being a rewrite of the application down the line. (disclaimer: I'm currently rebuilding an application because the existing codebase is a mess, a web-based UI built in mid-2000's technology in the 2010's by a C developer who never seems to have learned basic code quality / craftsmanship or web development practices. It can probably be salvaged but it'd a lot of work (160KLOC) with little gains compared to rebuilding it in a modern stack)
- icebraining 6y ago> Laziness to me is thinking "Eh this doesn't need tests" or "It might be possible to break it this way but I doubt anyone will try that" The hubris part prevents that. You can only be lazy when it doesn't hurt your pride.
- Tyr42 6y agoYeah but debugging suuucks. For the later part, I think "tires of tedium" is maybe what we mean? I mean, I might actually prefer writing more code even if it takes a little longer than doing the dumb task.
- chillfox 6y agoWell, from the outside that "stop and think" part looks a lot like slacking off and going home on time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- setr 6y agoChange that to "This task is repetitive and tedious, we are passing the threshold where writing an automatic solution is more work than manually completing the task" I write tests when I'm fed up with manually testing. I continue writing tests into the next program, because I'm still fed up with manually testing. A caveat though is that I despise working on anything UI related, because it's hard to test and I despise manual testing. But that's when I delegate :-) But thats also why its not just laziness, but lazy and intelligent -- the lazy and dumb man finds no solution, and simply drops the ball, because he's too lazy to do it. The lazy and smart man is too lazy to do it, and gets away with it