Life & Wisdom Quote by Larry Wall

"Programmers can be lazy" lands like a provocation, but Larry Wall is doing what good language designers often do: reclaiming a vice as an engineering principle. Coming from the creator of Perl, the line carries a wink. Wall famously framed "laziness" as one of the virtues of a programmer, not because he endorses half-done work, but because he prizes the refusal to repeat yourself. Laziness, here, is a demand for leverage: if a task is tedious twice, it should be automated the second time.

The intent is partly cultural defense. Programming is one of the few professions where writing less can mean building more. Wall is pushing back against the moralism that equates effort with value. The subtext: the best coders are allergic to pointless friction. They'd rather spend an hour writing a script than five minutes doing the same click-work every day for a month. That instinct doesn't make them indifferent; it makes them system-minded.

Context matters: Perl emerged in a late-80s/90s ecosystem of sysadmins and glue-code pragmatists, people stitching together messy realities under time pressure. Wall's "lazy" programmer is the person who notices patterns, bottles them, and shares the bottle. It also hints at Perl's own philosophy: make easy things easy, hard things possible, give the user enough expressive power to route around bureaucracy.

There's a sly warning embedded, too. Laziness becomes a virtue only when it's paired with accountability. Otherwise it's not automation; it's abandonment. Wall's line works because it flatters the programmer's self-image while quietly setting a higher bar: if you're going to be lazy, be cleverly, responsibly lazy.