Xah Lee wrote: > Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall > > Xah Lee, 20021124 > > In the unix community there's quite a large confusion and wishful > thinking about the word laziness. In this post, i'd like to make some > clarifications. > > American Heritage Dictionary third edition defines laziness as: > “Resistant to work or exertion; disposed to idleness.” > > When the sorcerer Larry Wall said “The three chief virtues of a > programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris”, he used the word > “laziness” to loosely imply “natural disposition that results in being > economic”. As you can see now, “Resistant to work or exertion” is > clearly not positive and not a virtue, but “natural disposition that > results in economy” is a good thing if true. > > When Larry Wall said one of programer's virtue is laziness, he wants > the unix morons to conjure up in their brains the following > proposition as true: “Resistant to work or exertion is a natural human > disposition and such disposition actually results behaviors being > economic”. This statement may be true, which means that human laziness > may be intuitively understood from evolution. However, this statement > is a proposition on all human beings, and is not some “virtue” that > can be applied to a group of people such as programers. > > Demagogue Larry Wall is smart in creating a confusion combined with > wishful thinking. By making subtle statements like this, he semi- > intentionally confuses average programers to think that it is OK to be > not thorough, it is OK to be sloppy, it is OK to disparage computer > science. (like the incompetent unixers and perlers are) > > Can you see the evil and its harm in not understanding things clearly? > This laziness quote by Wall is a tremendous damage to the computing > industry. It is a source among others that spurs much bad fashion > trends and fuckups in the industry. It is more damaging than any > single hack or virus. It is social brain-washing at work, like the > diamond company De Beers' tremendously successful sales slogan: “A > Diamond is Forever” or Apple's grammatically fantastic “Think > Different”. > > The most fundamental explanation of why Larry Wall's sophistry are > damaging to society is simply this: What he said is not true and they > are widely spread and conceived as worthwhile. This is a form of mis- > information. This is a manifestation of Love without Knowledge as i > expounded before, with subtle but disastrous consequences (already). > > [DISCLAIMER: all mentions of real persons are opinion only.] > > ---- > This post is archived at: > http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/perl_laziness.html > > Xah > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ∑ http://xahlee.org/ >
Laziness is re-posting something dated 2002. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
