I think my younger self’s quip was indirectly a reference to Wall’s list of virtues. That said, it’s ambiguous (to me) whether working to avoid work satisfies the first cited definition. It’s simultaneously lazy and non-lazy.

Of course that dichotomy is applied frequently in programming. It could easily be described as “redefining the problem”.

But in my early programming experience it was trading time dedicated to education and hacking in exchange for avoiding manual effort. I learned to programmatically access MP3 metadata so I could update my blog when I posted new songs I recorded, rather than typing out the information directly. That’s literally why I became a programmer, because I got tired of typing some stuff twice (as I had already typed it in iTunes when converting to MP3).

That certainly feels more like what I colloquially understand laziness to mean, than the cleverer reinterpretation used by Wall to describe what I understand as work substitution in programming as a non-novice.