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Lazy – Exploiting a New Programming Paradigm

Loicniragire on April 27, 2017

Should developers adopt habits of their compilers? In the world of modern programming languages, a new paradigm of laziness has emerged. In this ...
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Jamie Read

One of the things I will forever remember one of my teachers saying was "Programmers are lazy, we're very good at reducing the amount we have to write".

The context at the time was with functions and modularising code but with the shear amount of frameworks nowadays I think it's more true than ever!

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Sam

This is fantastic! I agree with the point entirely. We need to stop building heaping piles of unnecessary junk and build simple solutions to solve problems. Of course, some things require more thought, code, testing, etc. But most things most of us working on applications don't.

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James Hood

Nice post! Reminds me of the spirit behind BDD and Lean Startup's MVP. But have to note that laziness has been a programmer virtue for a long time... 😊

threevirtues.com

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Nitish Dayal

Three virtues was immediately where my mind went. :)

@loicniragire : In a tech world that dangerously embraces the 'daily grind' mentality, I think this article serves a very valuable purpose. Great post.

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Loicniragire

Thank you:-)

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Loicniragire

Haven't got much into BDD but I appreciate the reference!

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edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

I agree with the sentiment, but calling this "Lazy" isn't correct. Truly lazy programmers do things like not understanding the requirements first, sloppily copy-pasting code, failing to write any kind of tests, or even failing to test it once themselves. The truly lazy programmer alos make no attempt at generalization, or comparing to existing code.

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Loicniragire

I agree that it can be misinterpreted to call it "Lazy", but hopefully the idea is clear after reading the post. Thanks for pointing it out!

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Loicniragire

Excuse my Markdown formatting here, just getting used to it!

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Ben Halpern

I swooped in and made some adjustments for you. If you check out the changes, it should be a bit clearer.

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Loicniragire

I noticed that, thank you!