The Three Virtues of a GREAT Programmer

Three Virtues

According to Larry Wall(1), the original author of the Perl<br>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<br>reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving<br>programs that other people will find useful and document what you<br>wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

Impatience : The anger you feel when the computer is being<br>lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your<br>needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

Hubris : The quality that makes you write (and maintain)<br>programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

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

This is a website recovered from the Wayback Machine.

threevirtues.com was orginally made by Daniel Sherer and is preserved here for historical purposes.

Please contact admin@aronwk.com for any inquiries.