Life & Wisdom Quote by Larry Wall

Calling “laziness” a virtue is Larry Wall’s signature move: take a sin, run it through an engineer’s value system, and dare you to admit it describes your best days at work. The line lands because it flips moral language into performance language. Wall isn’t praising sloth; he’s praising the refusal to do the same dumb task twice. In programming, laziness becomes automation, abstraction, and the drive to build tools that save future time. It’s self-interest disguised as craftsmanship, and the disguise is thin on purpose.

Impatience is the darker, faster twin. Not petulance, but an allergy to friction: slow builds, clunky interfaces, needless ceremony. A good programmer’s impatience is a UX instinct pointed inward. It forces systems to feel snappy, error messages to be humane, and workflows to be streamlined because the maker can’t stand their own product when it drags.

Then hubris: the most provocative word here, and the real joke. Wall is poking at the ego baked into software culture, where confidence is a prerequisite for attempting to model the world in code. “Hubris” is also a warning label. You need enough swagger to ship a design you believe in, but not so much that you ignore edge cases, users, or reality.

Context matters: Wall, the creator of Perl, was arguing for a pragmatic, human-centered ethos. This is a bumper-sticker aphorism with a built-in code review: celebrate these traits, but only when they cash out as better software.