Lazycoder

How I picked my domain name

[Pragmatic Programming] Why Good Programmers are Lazy and Dumb: “According to this entry in the blog Google Blogoscoped, good programmers are lazy and dumb. This mirrors Larry Wall’s famous statement about the three great virtues of a programmer being laziness, impatience and hubris.”

(Via The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout.)

I don’t remember when I first registered this domain name, I was living in New Mexico so it must have been at least 3 years ago. Anyway, that’s what I think about programmers. The best ones are lazy, in fact most programmers are lazy. If it weren’t for their laziness, we’d all be inserting punch-cards or flipping switches to use computers. We’d still be typing in commands at a keyboard instead of hunting around our “desktop” looking for an “icon”. That’s why we are so hyped up about code reuse, we’re too lazy to have to write the same code over and over again. The irony of that is it usually takes more effort to make your code reusable than it does to just copy-paste your code over and over again. Heck, even the “RSS revolution” is more evidence of the laziness. We’re too lazy to even visit the same website each day, we want the content delivered to US.

The best programmers are lazy because they look at some repetitive task and say “I bet I could automate this. That would give me more time to work on more interesting things.”