Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Virtues of the Perl Programmer

Laziness

Laziness sounds like the vice of the same name, but there’s a difference. The vice is about the avoidance of immediate work. The virtue is about the avoidance of future work. Programmers with the power of Perl at their fingertips create the tools that make the same tasks easier the more they are done. Perl is a great language of automating tasks, and the more it automates today, the less work programmers do manually later.

Impatience

Impatience is that nasty feeling you get when the computer is doing what it wants instead of what you want. Or, more correctly, when the programmer on the other side of the software chose the wrong default settings, made a poor GUI, or doesn’t give you access to this data. You’ve experienced it enough to not inflict the same pain on other programmers, turning your frustration with your wasted time into a benefit for other people.

Hubris

Hubris is the sense that, with the right tools, you can do just about anything. It’s all a Simple Matter of Programming, right? It’s also the thing that’s likely to make you fly too close to the Sun.