RE: What if programmers ran government?
I am reminded of a story of the power of laziness...
A toothpaste manufacturer was having an issue where their assembly line systems were sometimes boxing up toothpaste boxes where the machines weren't actually putting tubes into the boxes. They hired a consulting company to fix the problem. The consultants did several tests and determined that they needed to install a secondary line check with a scale. If the scale detected a box of toothpaste below the average size/weight limit, it would stop the line until someone came and removed the empty box from the line. After a few weeks, the management were amazed that the fix was 100% successful. They didn't have a single instance where a box passed the line without a tube of toothpaste. Based on the initial fix, though, there should have been a margin of error, so they went to the line to double check their figures. When they got there, they found an ordinary desk fan clipped to the belt area in front of the scale with a pile of empty boxes underneath it. Apparently, the employee in charge of removing and restarting the line when the scale triggered got so fed up with getting up and resetting the line that he clipped a fan to the equipment to blow the empty boxes off the line before they got to the scale.
Laziness inspires ingenuity and creativity.
Perhaps you are familiar with the Three Virtues of Programming by Larry Wall?
According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
This is exactly the point, often people are disinclined to talk about laziness in a serious context because they believe their reputation is on the line. It is a tool at our disposal and we can take advantage of it to do spectacular things.
But let's not forget, there's good lazy and there's bad lazy.