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I know it's mostly just a meme, but I find the idea that laziness is a virtue unfortunate; IMHO it's one of the worst vices a programmer/team player can have.

by Vinnl 6y ago

I know it's mostly just a meme, but I find the idea that laziness is a virtue unfortunate; IMHO it's one of the worst vices a programmer/team player can have. Not taking five extra minutes to explain what you did when submitting a Pull Request - that's laziness, and forces your team mates to spend more time and mental effort on understanding what's going on. Not going back over your diff one last time before submitting it for review - that's laziness, and it puts the onus on discovering things you forgot on your team mates. Not going through the effort of making individual changes easy to revert - that's laziness, and it forces the future maintainer (possibly yourself) to put in extra work at a time when they're under stress, e.g. when fixing a critical bug. I could go on.

w0mbat 6y ago
It's "lazy" in the sense that you look for the simplest most leveraged way of doing something well, not "lazy" as in negligent. A lazy programmer takes time to search for the things that the OS will do "for free". Keeping up with and using, the latest developments in OS libraries. This can save you a lot of coding, and gives you capabilities that are likely to keep working on diverse future hardware. A lazy programmer will check in the smallest possible fix when fixing other's code. The simplest change takes time to isolate, but it causes the least disturbance and reduces chance of side-effects and new bugs. It also makes the change comprehensible to others, which saves time having to explain it. If you do something right the first time, you don't have to do it again, and in order to do that you have to do it simply and carefully or you will never get it right.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  Yeah I know that that's the origin of the meme (I mean, it's literally in the post), bit when it becomes a quip it still rubs me the wrong way when it's actually true, bit not in the good way. I guess basically, I'd just like to remove the positive connotations with the term, and instead just focus on the actual virtue: working efficiently. Of course, it's not a major issue. It's just semantics, and I'm not that much of a 'language matters' type of person.
Igelau 6y ago
While do you have a point, there's no virtue that doesn't become corrosive when pushed to the extreme. The author is clearly advocating a safe and useful subset of lazy behaviors. Mostly the kind that avoid tech debt and burnout.

by Vinnl 6y ago

w0mbat 6y ago

It's "lazy" in the sense that you look for the simplest most leveraged way of doing something well, not "lazy" as in negligent. A lazy programmer takes time to search for the things that the OS will do "for free". Keeping up with and using, the latest developments in OS libraries. This can save you a lot of coding, and gives you capabilities that are likely to keep working on diverse future hardware. A lazy programmer will check in the smallest possible fix when fixing other's code. The simplest change takes time to isolate, but it causes the least disturbance and reduces chance of side-effects and new bugs. It also makes the change comprehensible to others, which saves time having to explain it. If you do something right the first time, you don't have to do it again, and in order to do that you have to do it simply and carefully or you will never get it right.

Vinnl 6y ago
Yeah I know that that's the origin of the meme (I mean, it's literally in the post), bit when it becomes a quip it still rubs me the wrong way when it's actually true, bit not in the good way. I guess basically, I'd just like to remove the positive connotations with the term, and instead just focus on the actual virtue: working efficiently. Of course, it's not a major issue. It's just semantics, and I'm not that much of a 'language matters' type of person.

Igelau 6y ago

While do you have a point, there's no virtue that doesn't become corrosive when pushed to the extreme. The author is clearly advocating a safe and useful subset of lazy behaviors. Mostly the kind that avoid tech debt and burnout.