Unfortunatly it was that weird type of lazy that ends up being more work and stress in the end as well.
"Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare."
Xanadu's vision was perhaps even more ambitious than it was transformative, with the promise of production code always pushed further out of reach as project goalposts moved again and again.
UNIX was perhaps the lazy vision, but it was also an extremely pragmatic one. Project goalposts were firmly planted, and production code proliferated early even during the design process.
I think the moral here isn't that we should be lazy, but that we have to temper our ambition with enough practicality to ensure great ideas don't end up as only mental masturbation for a few cultured types.
UNIX was perhaps the lazy vision, but it was also an extremely pragmatic one.
Sure, in the same way eating shit is more pragmatic than cooking. Fortunately for the UNIX weenies, computers getting a mere few trillion times faster makes UNIX look downright efficient, and GNU actually writing correct software made it look like it wasn't completely worthless.
Project goalposts were firmly planted, and production code proliferated early even during the design process.
That implies there was a design process.
I think the moral here isn't that we should be lazy, but that we have to temper our ambition with enough practicality to ensure great ideas don't end up as only mental masturbation for a few cultured types.
I think the real moral here is that some people will justify anything, no matter how asinine, and idiots will endlessly create new religions with new gods, even when decrying religion itself.
There have been problems that have stayed with UNIX for decades, because no one ever fixes them, because the changes won't be accepted, because it's better to be backwards-compatible than correct, because the glorious leaders got it right the first time, with the proof being these have stayed with UNIX for decades.