On Lazyness
John Backus
… John Backus said during a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”1
Larry Wall (and Tom Christiansen and Jon Orwant)
“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” — LarryWall 2
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. (p.609)
Impatience
The anger you feel when the program is clumsy, when it’s not smart enough. (p.608)
Hubris
Hubris (or hýbris, from the ancient Greek ὕβρις) is a concept that refers to excessive pride, arrogance, or extreme self-confidence, especially when it leads a person to defy moral norms, the gods (in mythological contexts), or the laws of nature. (p.607)