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Last active August 23, 2024 22:18
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The Three Virtues of a GREAT Programmer
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virtues.md

According to Larry Wall1, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris:

  • Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
  • Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
  • Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

Footnotes

  1. Quoted from "Programming Perl", 2nd Edition, O'Reilly & Associates, 1996 ↩

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