"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris."
Now, there have been numerous interpretations of these virtues. But we're not going to bother with those; I'll be providing my own take on this. (What? Last time I checked, this is my blog.)
So the burning question - why are these virtues? In most other contexts, they would be considered sins. However, not just any lazy, impatient and arrogant SOB can be considered a great programmer. In fact, it takes a special kind of lazy, impatient and arrogant SOB to be a programmer at all. And I humbly submit that these three virtues are stated in that order for a good reason - they separate the adequate from the good, and the good from the great.
The Virtue of the Adequate Programmer - Laziness
If you remember nothing else about programming, remember this: minimum input, maximum output. All programming is about solving problems and automating tasks. Whatever fancy new gimmicks and technological advances the next twenty years throws at you, philosophically, programming does not change. This has been, is, and will always be; the one truth about programming. Whatever languages you use, whatever platform you swear undying loyalty to, it all goes back to this in the end - minimum input, maximum output.The ultimate aim of any program is to make life easier. Because the awful alternative is more work. Not just more work - more boring and repetitive work which would be better done by machines.
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| Make the slaves do the work. |
Programmers are always looking for the shortest, most direct route from Point A to Point B. They are always looking for a way to reduce that repetitive, monotonous task into a series of processes and outsourcing them for a dumb machine to execute. In other words, programmers are the taskmasters, and computers are the slaves. If that's not lazy, I don't know what is. The question is invariably "can this be automated?" followed by "how much can this be automated?".
Human beings get distracted. They get bored. They get frustrated. Machines don't. And therefore machines are the perfect candidates as slaves to carry out all that mindless work and in the process make life easier for the programmer. Notice how I said "make life easier" twice?
This is virtue numero uno for a good reason - not all programmers have the other two virtues (and therefore not all programmers are good, or great). But all programmers (and their cousins, the web developers) have to embrace this virtue at their core.
How not to be Lazy
Laziness comes in various forms. Not every form of laziness is admirable. If that laziness leads to more work down the road, it's counter-productive.Copy-pasting code blindly without checking for relevance and room for improvement - that certainly qualifies. It's something I actively avoid.
If the code is going to be reused in the foreseeable future, invest a bit of time abstracting it into methods and subroutines so that it's easy to reuse and maintain. The Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle is applicable here.
Sloppy code, lax security measures, incomplete test cases are all good examples, cases where the programmer couldn't be arsed to close that last loophole. Guilty as charged. Sometimes reality demands that I have to cut corners. It's not an excuse, but sometimes people have to choose between being a bad programmer who delivers, and being a great programmer who's out of a job.
In an age where many great programmers have paved the way for us by writing systems that automate even programming tasks, it's very easy to be lazy in the wrong way. Plenty of developers I know don't bother with the basics because that newfangled framework takes care of it for them. I'm guilty of this too. For instance, garbage collection and memory management is not exactly something I like to concern myself with - though in my defence, as a web developer, my priorities lie elsewhere.
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