Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

This is an old (1980s) meme started by Larry Wall, creator of Perl. I would have liked to see Philip Lenssen nod at Larry's famous comment that great programmers should be "lazy, impatient and full of hubris." Which, like most Perl code, is obfuscating to the point of Zen.

Good series of conversations with Wall here:
http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/wall/

Gordon, I only later heard of Larry's quote, but in my article I did say that the "programmers should be lazy" meme is not new (I came across it many times), but that I found the "programmers should be dumb" meme to be more new (see fourth paragraph).

Lenssen's post generated lots of predictable humorous comments. This one struck me though - '...the article has nearly nothing to do with programming. All the valid points equally apply to other areas...'

Now there's some accurate insight. As a guy who spends most of his time bridging the void between tech users and tech developers, I see far more of the traditional 'lazy and dumb' behavior in all business areas than I do of the assertive 'lazy and dumb' that Lenssen adcocates.

Developers have really applied Lenssen's lazy/dumb paradigm when it comes to the use of wikis. Where I don't see wiki's being applied any time soon due to institutionalized lazy/dumbness is in the non-tech areas of business - and they could really use it.

The first time I ran across the meme was in a Robert Heinlein story, Time enough for Love (1973) "Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." It is the story of a lazy man who invents all kind of useful things in his quest to get back into his hammock and sit there sipping a cool drink.

What this the origin of the meme, given programmers love of Science Fiction?