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Am I the only one who thought copy pasting code was cheating until my cousin watched me try to solve a bug for 3 hours?
My cousin stopped by my place in Boise two months back and watched me struggle with a loop problem in Python. I kept typing everything by hand because I felt like copying from Stack Overflow was lazy. He laughed and said he copies working code all the time, then reads it line by line to figure out why it works. That hit me different because I had been stuck on the same bug for 3 hours and he solved it in 20 minutes. Now I paste stuff into a blank file and add comments to each line until it makes sense. Does anyone else do the comment thing or is that just me?
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danielnelson28d ago
Copying code isn't cheating at all, and calling it lazy misses the point of how this job actually works. Nobody memorizes syntax or writes everything from scratch, that's not what good devs do. What matters is understanding what you pasted and being able to fix it when it breaks. Your comment method is solid because it forces you to slow down and actually read the logic instead of just trusting it. I'd argue the real problem was those 3 hours you wasted typing by hand, not the copying. Being prideful about hand-typing every line doesn't make you a better programmer, it just makes you slower.
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