Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb
" I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb.
Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production.
This makes a lazy programmer a good programmer. Of course, this is only half the truth; for a lazy programmer to be a good programmer, he (or she) also must be incredibly unlazy when it comes to learning how to stay lazy – that is, which software tools make his work easier, which approaches avoid redundancy, and how he can make his work be maintained and refactored easily. (By the way, the word “unlazy” has 14,400 hits in Google; I’m sure this makes it legal.)
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