There is a fair amount of code you should copy/paste unless you are doing pure research, some because it has been so well studied it is almost a certainty that you are not going to drastically improve on it and others, such as encryption implementations, because it is actively dangerous to fuck about with unless you are extremely careful and a domain expert.

If you're copy-pasting encryption implementations rather than using an existing library, you're probably doing it wrong.

Well yes, but libraries are really just an advanced form of copy/pasting and you can still do damage by using the library incorrectly, so you often end up using sections of examples by the people who wrote the library or who are otherwise experts in its use on how to implement the library correctly.

Sure, you can argue that library use is copy-pasting, if those snippets you're pasting come with regression tests and have been code-reviewed by multiple people.

I'm going to go ahead and suggest that a tremendous number of encryption mistakes are made specifically because people copy-paste library invocations without understanding what they're invoking and why. When you just sling a chunk of code into a project without understanding what you're doing and why, the potential for bugs goes through the roof.

I agree that you need to understand what you are doing and why. I'm not saying that these bits should be treated like magic, just that you should think very carefully before you differ from them by very much.

Now I need to go buy another keyboard. Thanks :)

To the GP: Swizec has it, please don't stop.

please define $$$++?

Well, you take a dollar amount. Then you increase it. Then you increase it some more. Because companies who can afford it will pay you pretty much anything if you can make their whole engineering team even just a few percent more productive by improving the codebase. Or can figure out very hairy issues caused by Daily WTF style situations.

For example, I have a friend who sometimes fixes bugs in compiled software running banking systems with no access to the original code and woefully out of date documentation. He gets paid some 300eur an hour in a country where the median developer salary is only about 30k eur per year (about 14eur/h)

Sure, that particular type of problem likely/hopefully isn't caused by copy-paste programming, but it is caused by the sort of endemic issues copy-paste programmers to produce.

IMO, as it often turns out to be, whether or not the code is copied and pasted doesn't matter by itself.

A competent programmer borrowing code would likely factor it in in a way that won't present maintenance burden later on, and first of all would know when borrowing is appropriate. An incompetent programmer may produce problematic code even regardless of whether it's borrowed or original.

(Though I'd agree that incompetent programmer borrowing chunks of code from different sources without thinking is ‘worse’ than same programmer just writing bad code by himself—more predictability in the latter case.)

In my case, I regularly see borrowed code in projects that I maintain. As long as it's contained in an isolated module, documented (unless it's short and obvious) and used appropriately, I don't see a problem.

Interestingly, front-end code I work on seems to suffer from much worse-quality borrowing—it's like Python people lose all their discipline once they turn to JavaScript.

Agreed. I do actually copypaste code in some very specific scenarios. For instance, writing a string capitalization function for Javascript and not needing a whole string processing library.

Sure, you copy paste a line of code after inspecting it, and save yourself some half hour of time on a piece of code that is not core to the problem you're solving.

But I have never seen a programmer who says "I am in the business of getting shit done, so I copy paste code" to produce good code. Anecdotal evidence and whatnot, and my argument could be a bit of a strawman, but this is the sort of canary in a gold mine that I've found.

When a developer on my team says "I just want to get shit done", is when I start preparing for a lot of internal screaming down the line. Happens every single time. Every. Single. Time.

So no, while copy-pasting on its own is not the problem, it is a good symptom to look for.

I actually had someone bitch me out on StackOverflow for having an answer that wasn't useful to him, and it was slowing down his "above-industry average productivity rate". I had a damn good laugh about that one.

Man... can I ask what led a company into the situation where they need to fix software without source code access? Did they rely on a vendor that went out of business? I imagine it is ancient software from the 80's or 90's?

To answer you, I'm 24, and an accountant by profession. From what I've seen, most banks still run some core functionality of their systems in IBM Mainframe, which includes JCL, COBOL and maybe other languages.

Because of space constraints then, file names were limited to 8 characters (someone correct me) and lines of code has fixed lengths. That already made commenting a nightmare. I have 'reverse engineered' scripts that were written more than a decade before I was born. Most have outdated documentation, filenames are a mess to figure out, and over time there have been automated conversion tools that were used to update language versions.

As I said, most of these systems still run some core functionality of the bank, and the people who wrote them ain't there no more, so banks have to shell out lots of money to either fix and maintain these, or to figure out what's happening so they can move to newer systems.

A form of anecdote could be that because IBM still make some form of x64 flavour Mainframe OS indicates that large corporates still have code that's potentially double my age.

I don't know the whole story, but seeming as this was banking software I wouldn't be surprised if it was indeed written some time in the 80's or 90's and the original developers were nowhere to be found.

i know it's not your first language but since you mentioned you like to think and understand things, the correct syntax is '80s and '90s; the apostrophe is used to indicate letter omission. incidentally, my first language was basic. didn't want to omit that :)

Thanks for responding with a specific $ amount. I do indeed appreciate it.

It means 'lots of money'.

...."lots of money" varies from community to community.

Which is why saying lots of money if more useful than specifying an amount, because that amount may or may not be a lot of money where the reader is from, but might be a huge amount where the person who posted it is from.

I read it a bit of a joke, not meant maliciously, and yet with a lot of truth to it.

I'm sort of in between "get shit done" and "fix other people's shit" in my work. Because I like to take pride in my work, and because I don't want to leave the full timers with yet more contractor mess, I take care to do my job as well as I can. And I prefer projects where I can be proud of everything I do.

But in the 'trenches' of unsexy work, where my ideals meet reality, neither I nor the full-timers always have the time, money, or expertise to do things right, and are sometimes even forced by management to just get it done.

And I don't always mind. I can be happy with the result because it serves its purpose, and I made both the managers and many customers happy, even though I cringe at the underlying mess we produced. I know it is likely to cause much more work down the road, and I would generally advise against 'ship first, refactor later', but I'm also okay with the idea that I provide work for specialists to fix my mess.

Can I call myself a 'programmer'? Or am I more of a 'code monkey'? Do 'real' programmers thumb their nose at my sometimes shoddy code?

I don't really care. I'm happy with my work, and with my solutions. My aim is to move towards being able to provide full, high-quality solutions, because that makes me happier. But it also makes me happy to creatively solve problems in a way that might be imperfect, or frowned upon by some.

The most important reason for me to provide good, solid, readable code is because I care about the full-timers I meet who don't enjoy fixing my mess, and because I don't want my client to get into trouble later. That's why. It's primarily (but not exclusively) because I work with humans and I don't want to abuse my 'privilege' as a contractor and (relatively) skilled communicator to give other people headaches and crying fits over having to fix my junk. I've seen that happen, and it sucks.

(sorry, not necessarily directing this at you specifically)

You missed this part of the post then:

> whole teams grind to a halt productivity-wise because the codebase is so bad

I didn't miss this part - you didn't put any reasoning behind it.

An ad hominem argument is one in which you reject a position not on its merits but because of who is making it. They took a position that copy/pasting code leads to unmaintainable code, therefore his argument is not ad hominem.

He's being insulting, sure, but that doesn't mean he's making an ad hominem argument.

It is ad hominem. The ad hominem part is the part which infers the parent poster makes whole teams grind to a halt and also earns less than himself.