Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

I am a lazy developer.

version franaise

The kindest compliment I ever received

On a professional level I mean.

In 2004, I was in engineering school at ENSIMAG, Grenoble, France.
Our class was struggling on a quite difficult algorithimic challenge.
For my part, I had given up and was trying to find a way to work around the main difficulty.
Suddenly, a loud intervention from my professor:

Jean-Michel, I have been watching you for a while now.
And I must tell you something

You are very lazy

You will be a great engineer

What would you say are your three greatest strengths and weaknesses?

We have all heard at least once this stupid question in a job interview.
Actually, if that's not your case, please write a comment, that would give me hope.

And as a general rule, stupid question -> stupid answer.

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Or frankly here, you would be justified to turn the tables:

Yes sure, give me one minute to order my thoughts.
In the meantime, I have a question for you :
What would you say are the three most annoying questions one could ask in a job interview?

But humans are creative, and no matter how stupid the question, one can always try to give it a clever answer.

Larry Wall's answer

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

Larry Wall is a US linguist.

He is also best known as the creator of Perl. At least to the odler folks, Perl is not often used those days (I think?). But Perl played a big role in daring to question the old Unix dogmas, helped the early internet to rise, played the role of Python's nemesis, and was a major inspiration for Ruby.

But even if you don't use Perl, and I sure don't, Larry Wall is a very interesting guy.

I mean most programming books are bad or boring (same for every other subject), the good ones are helpful, a few are super interesting, but Larry Wall's book belong to the happy few programming books that on top of all that made me laugh.

I didn't know that was possible.

[Video] What skills or characteristics do you need to be a great programmer?

You should watch the video, I think it's a quite cool one. But I know you are probably in the subway, if you live outside of the US anyway, or you are in a super loud caf, or you have an hearing handicap.

No issue, I will make a transcription just for you.

"This is a joke", almost

Laziness, Impatience and hubris.

These originated as sort of a joke in the first edition of what we call the Camel Book, the book that teaches the Perl programming language.

And in a sense, these are the three virtus of a programmer.

A lazy person will try always to find some way to do something, will always be looking for ways to do something faster, more efficiently.

And if you really want to control the world, thats really sort of a hubristic notion. Excessive pride. The kind of thing Zeus zaps you for having.

But it really was sort of a joke.

In the japanese edition of the translated edition of the Camel Book, they had to add Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. (THIS IS A JOKE). Because they thought people could take it seriously.

But really what makes someone a good programmer is much more than those three things.

Hobbits Would Make Great Programmers

If you have either read Lord of the Rings or seen the movies, you know about Hobbits. Well : Hobbits manifest many of the virtues you need as a programmer.

You need to have persistence when the going is rough to keep slogging through. A kind of innate stubborness. In an happy way, not in a mean way.

You have to be smart enough to outwit your ennemies occasionally.

You have to be able to be social, you have to be able to deal with a group of team members. Some of which are like you, they are other hobbits. Some of which are elves, dwarfes. Or even men.

They think very diffirently from you.

So you have to contribute your part as a hobbit, but also be able to understand other things. The day is long passed where programming was done individually. Almost all programming is done in teams.

So for example you need to be litterate. You have to be able to read documentation. And to write documentation that others can understand.

But mostly you need to be just slightly insane, in the way hobbits are. Where they can view the long term, where the goal is to go back to your cosy village. But also at the same time, they can forget about all that and deal only with the problem they have at hand.

On more concrete terms

On more concrete terms, you may be telling a computer to do various things. On one hand you have to be aware of what happens at a low level. But if you are aware of that all the time, you are going nuts. So you have to shutdown and work on high-level abstractions.

And doing both simultanously gives the best results in programming. If you ignore one of those, you end up messing up.

So thats what you really need.

A hobbit is lazy in a very industrious way.

A hobbit is impatient in a very patient way.

A hobbit is proud in a very humble way.

It sort of sounds contradictory. But to the extent that you can increase your dynamic range on all of those . you will be a better programmer.

FAQ: What the F# is Hubris?

One name: Napolon.

In the early 1800s, after having vainquished many european coalitions, Napolon controlled pretty much all of continental Europe. But he couldn't help himself and decided to invade an allied country, Spain. Disaster. And then he couldn't help himself and decided to invade an allied country, Russia. You know where this leads: in the middle of the atlantic ocean.

That's what hubris is. Dangerously excessive pride.

As Larry Wall mentionned, there are pretty cool greek mythology stories around Hubris, as you can find out on Wikipedia

Laziness, Impatience, Hubris & Me

If you have read this far, you probably find the mantra interesting, funny, clever.
And sure, it is all that. That's part of the reason I chose it as my personal mantra.

Jean-Michel Fayard Follow

Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

But for me this mantra is more than that, it is meaningful.

It tells something important about me

Hubris, for me, consist in being stubborn and selective when I choose the kind of project I work on. It's enough for me that you put things on the Blockchain, or that the Elon guy tweeted about it, or that BigCompany pays for it. I need a convincing answer to one nasty question.

Who really needs this project, and why?

The search for meaning is the constant struggle of career.

Impatience is clearly a personnality trait that I have. I left the Android world in part because its slow build times were for me an agony. And that was the right thing to do.

Caveat : impatience is my least favorite of the three, because it is very much a double edged sword. I have sometimes hurt people I love by being too impatient. And that's where the extend your dynamic range principle comes shines : what I have learned is to way more patient with people, and even less patient with tools.

Lazyness finally is my dominant great virtue, as first observed by this clever teacher.
And it would be easy put an asterisk on lazy, I could point out that I have written 100 articles here, and others on in my french-speaking blog, that I have started a successfull open source projects, have shitloads of stuff on my GitHub, that I have learned 7 programming languages, and also 7 real languages, and 4 music instruments, ...

In sum I could say it's only a joke.
But I won't hide behind my little finger.
Unironically: I have a significant dosis of lazyness in my soul.
And not just because nobody is perfect.

But because I choose a profession that fits my personnality.
Programming means automating.
We are not supposed to be the digital equivalent of Charlie Chaplin's depiction of workers of the industrial age doing boring and repetitive tasks.

And even more importantly:

Lazyness has often been the sacred source of my creativity.
And I won't apologize for it because I don't want it to dry up.

Related

Pretty cool article from @sobolevn

I am a mediocre developer

Nikita Sobolev Mar 13 '18 6 min read

#learning #career #beginners #productivity

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Please have a nice lazy day