Is copy paste programming bad ?
- by ring bearer
With plain google as well as google code search tools it is easy to find how to program using some resource or solve certain problems ( such as a Java class, or a ftp block in perl etc) and so developers are so tempted to just purely copy paste the code (in a way re-use) - is this an incompetency? I have done this myself though I think I am a better programmer than many others I have seen. Who has the time to RTFM? In this age of information abundance, I do not think that copy paste programming is bad.
Isn't that what sites like stackoverflow do anyway? People ask - ok here is my problem - how to solve it? now someone will post complete code and the person who asked the question would simply copy paste the most voted answer. No matter how small the problem is.
I am working with a bunch of young coders who heavily rely on internet to get their job done. I see convenience (for example, you may be quite good with algorithms and such but you may not know how to use a BufferedReader in Java - would you read complete Javadoc for BufferedReader or look up some example of using it somewhere??) in copy pasting and modifying code to get the job done. What are the real dangers of copy paste coding that can impact their competency?
