A Good Programmer is a Lazy Programmer

However, the reverse is usually not true…

Daniel Nations
Level Up Coding
Published in
6 min readFeb 17, 2020

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While it might not be something you want to lead with in a job interview, one basic philosophy that separates good programmers from the rest of the pack is that of laziness. A good programmer feels the same way about basic tasks such as looping through a recordset and performing simple logic based on the results with the same zeal as an elementary school student attacking their math homework, minus the full-fledged freak out but possibility not minus the grumbling acceptance of work to be done.

Let’s face it, coding is sometimes just an advanced form of data entry. It’s something to get through rather than sink our teeth into.

And often, it’s an opportunity.

The art of being a good programmer through laziness is to always be on the lookout for patterns and ways to package them. The goal is to get through the mindbogglingly dull portions of the project as quickly as possible so we can focus more time and effort on the actual problem solving.

To be fair, most programmers know this to a degree. After all, objects and functions are the fundamental building blocks of development and applications are just packaged building blocks being passed through over and over to produce results. But the good programmer takes these ideas to an extreme level.

At this point, I will stop and state what should hopefully be obvious: The reverse is not true. A lazy programmer is rarely good. You know the person I’m talking about. Maybe they like to execute that query and stare at the screen for three minutes while it runs rather than opening up a new tab and working on a different piece of code. Perhaps they don’t feel they need proper error handling because “code is supposed to work perfectly.” Or maybe they are fine taking the long way around because they are there to do exactly what is told to them and not deviate from the plan even if it contains obvious inefficiencies.

A good programmer is lazy because they prefer working on portions of the project that are difficult rather than typing in code that basically writes itself.

This isn’t a contest to get the least amount of work done. It isn’t about clocking out at 5, going home and…

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I am a writer, game developer, husband, father, dog owner, independent, gamer and wannabe herpetologist. http://www.nations-software.info/