Editing Open Sourcing the Virtues of a Perl Programmer (section)

=== ''Practical Wisdom'' or Prudence, Not Laziness ===

Unlike the vice of laziness, this virtue concerns practical wisdom: the ability to make sound decisions and take fitting action based on understanding, experience, consequences, and the real end being pursued. This aligns closely with Wall's explanation of laziness as the quality that motivates a programmer to expend effort now in order to reduce the total expenditure of effort later.<ref name="Wall1996" /> The programmer writes a reusable tool, automates repetitive work, or documents a system because doing so serves future users and maintainers.

The deficient extreme is not simply “working too hard.” It is failing to learn from repeated work: performing the same tedious task indefinitely, writing disposable fixes when a durable solution is warranted, or optimizing the immediate moment while imposing avoidable costs on everyone who follows. The excessive extreme appears when foresight becomes over-engineering — a framework for a problem that may never exist, an abstraction nobody can understand, or endless deliberation that prevents useful code from being released. Practical wisdom lies in judging how much architecture, automation, documentation, and foresight the real problem actually deserves.