Monday, March 1, 2010

Laziness in Moderation

A good programmer has to be just the right amount of lazy. If he is too lazy, he will simply copy & paste his code and modify a few lines. In the end, his codebase will be unmaintainable, but he might be promoted due to the amazing lines-of-code (LOC) he has achieved. If he is not lazy enough, he will not shirk from doing something over and over again. Both character flaws (too lazy and too eager) result in code that is hard to maintain. 
-- Heinz Kabutz, Generating Static Proxy Classes 2/2

Laziness is a subtle thing.  I always figured "copy & paste ... and modify a few lines" was more work, and it strongly resembles "doing something over and over again".

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