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

=== ''Spiritedness'', Not Impatience ===

Accounting for the passionate aspect of human nature, spiritedness encompasses the energy that makes a person care that something is broken, slow, unjust, neglected, or needlessly difficult. Wall's “impatience” describes anger at a computer that is failing to serve human needs and the resulting desire to make software more responsive and anticipatory.<ref name="Wall1996" /> Properly ordered, that energy is productive: it turns irritation into repair.

The deficient extreme is apathy. A project can decline because nobody cares enough to fix a regression, answer a newcomer, update a document, challenge a harmful assumption, or carry an abandoned module forward. The excessive extreme is familiar to every long-lived online community: technical disagreement becomes personal combat, urgency becomes contempt, and conviction becomes a crusade. Spiritedness is therefore not mere anger; it is energy disciplined toward a good worth pursuing.