[ChrisH]

I think there's a difference between sloppiness or sloth and "creative laziness". Sloppiness and sloth lead to all sorts of evil like undocumented code and the indiscriminant use of GOTO. Creative laziness is really applying the mind to make the task easier to accomplish and ultimately results in less effort expended. In general this is a good thing.

Here's a historical example:

Around the turn of the last century, there was a young man who wanted to go to college and become educated. However due to family circumstances, at the last minute he could not go and wound up getting a job as a hod carrier. That is, he spent his day carrying bricks and mortar to brick layers who were building buildings etc. Being an intelligent guy, he pretty soon started making suggestions to his supervisor on how to make his job and the job of the bricklayers easier. The supervisor told him to shut up and STOP BEING LAZY. So he went back and kept thinking of other ways to do the job easier while carrying all that stuff around. He also kept pestering the supervisor.

Finally the supervisor called his bluff. He was told that he had one day to prove his ideas and if they didn't work he would shut up or be fired. Then he was given the slowest bricklayer on the job for his test. After some instruction and I think a trip to the hardware store for some minor items, our hero was ready for the test. That day the slowest bricklayer on the job laid more bricks than the fastest guy by a significant margin, like 30%. The supervisor shut up and let our hero do things his way.

Eventually the young man stared his own company and trained his own bricklayers. It is reputed that he never lost a bid. He could afford to under bid everybody because his workforce could lay 30% more bricks in a day than his competitors. Later he sold the construction firm because he was he was more interested in making life easier for people than in putting up buildings.

So he went into the consulting business and became an "efficiency expert". His name was Frank Gilbreth, and he was one of the founders of what we now call Industrial Engineering.

Mr Gilbreth did nothing to change the way the buildings were designed or constructed. His bricklayers laid straight, even courses just like the other bricklayers of the day. They did not get their increased productivity through sloppiness. In fact, because of his radical methods he was more closely scrutinized than he would have been otherwise. The only place he changed things was in how the bricks and mortar made their way from the delivery pile to their place in the building. He reduced that labor drastically and made it so that bricklayers could spent their time laying down mortar and brick and not picking up bricks and moving them into place.

Now that's what I call laziness.....a supreme effort to not do work that is unnecessary or counterproductive. But because it often requires time observing and thinking, not doing, this effort looks an awful lot like sloth to the uninformed.

I could give other examples, but this post is long enough.