Lazy People Make Progress
Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
-Robert Heinlein
This came up today on the ‘Quote of the Day’ box on my iGoogle page.
It strikes me as being very true, and very applicable to many software developers. It’s not that we don’t work very hard; but it’s that that we’re so lazy that we will often work very hard to save ourselves the effort of having to work on stuff we hate doing.
Someone, like me, who is a compulsive programmer, would much rather spend an hour writing code to automate a boring task than spend half an hour actually doing the task manually. Even if we’re only ever going to have to perform the task once!
There’s some great stuff about compulsive programmers in Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum, written way back in 1976, but full of very useful insights into today’s world even so.
