Comments on: Laziness Makes A Great Developer

By: Keeping PHP Gangsta » Blog Archive » Logging to Firebug is Definitely Gangsta

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:43:53 +0000

[...] the script. I will admit this is generally not that difficult a task, but as a friend of mine pointed out, programmers–the good ones anyway–are necessarily lazy (not lazy in terms of sitting [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:17:03 +0000

Larry Wall wrote about the “virtues of programming” in _Programming Perl_ long ago, and that may not have been the first place. Nevertheless, they are: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.

Laziness because it leads to putting in effort to make things easier over time.

Impatience because the computer shouldn’t seem lazy and slow.

Hubris because it means producing code out that others might admire and not ridicule.

By: Daniel Cousineau

Daniel Cousineau — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:36:11 +0000

While laziness is a strong word, I still think it holds true. Manually testing and deploying requires a lot of work and attention where as automation does not. Laziness :)

Of course I’m using “Laziness” a bit facetiously.

By: Jeff Carouth

Jeff Carouth — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:07:00 +0000

I think that the terminology of the title is a bit off. Yes these are great characteristics of an addition to a team, but the terminology of “laziness” paints a picture. Automation isn’t necessarily to appease the lazy nature of “great” programmers as much as it is meant to improve the efficiency of the development workflow and to promote and facilitate a more sustainable product down the road.

I’ve found that automation, especially in the context you framed above, really helps to ensure that “commits” are stable, working code and ensure that products are rock solid. Functionality is easy to make, the quick and dirty way. And in our particular arena–the php world–the abundance of quick-and-dirty code is overwhelming. This is where a build process helps drive “good” coders to become “great” coders. They are forced into creating the automated testing, they are forced to ensuring their code passes and does not break the build, and they love it.

- Jeff