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

=== ''Good Order'', Not Hubris ===

Far from harmful pride, Good Order concerns the disposition to leave code, projects, and communities in a condition that other people can inhabit. Wall's explanation of “hubris” points toward the desire to write and maintain programs whose quality will withstand the judgment of others.<ref name="Wall1996" /> At its best, that is not vanity but stewardship: clear interfaces, maintainable code, responsible releases, useful documentation, and conventions that reduce needless friction.

The deficient extreme is disorder: clever but inscrutable code, abandoned distributions, inconsistent processes, and institutional memory that exists only in the head of one indispensable maintainer. The excessive extreme is order treated as an end in itself — process that smothers contribution, style rules elevated above substance, or governance that protects its own machinery more carefully than the people and work the machinery was meant to serve. Good Order is structure proportioned to a real human and technical purpose.