
Do you really know how to program or you just copy-paste stuff? - redcat7
https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Do-programmers-really-know-how-to-program?share=1
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oblib
The body of work that's focused on making programming easier, faster, and more
efficient is immense and purposely includes code examples that are designed to
be copied and pasted and configured. If you know how to use them you are
programming. If you don't, well, you won't get far.

Once you understand the basics of programming you can apply them to any
language so the problem becomes the syntax they use and really, if you focus
on learning that on a "need to know" basis you can be productive even without
being fluent by using a "copy-paste-configure" approach.

The end goal is to produce something so, in short, it's smart to leverage that
huge body of work and, in fact, clearly wasteful to ignore it.

~~~
redcat7
My question comes from the fact that how we code and how our tools look like
and what is code and what structure it[code] is, says that we are coding in
most stupid way possible, most error prone way there is and most slowest one.
No to mention we are hitting walls in darkness.

~~~
oblib
Yeah, structure is an issue and I agree that there is no good common way to go
about it. We're all pretty much winging it. You make tools and add features as
you need them and no matter how you approach it you end up with a Rube
Goldberg kind of machine.

Before I wrote code I built custom cars and the process is really much the
same. You know what you want but there is no book of directions on how to make
it and nothing else out there is quite like it so you just start making it and
keep working on it until it's done.

Every app is essentially hand built and every builder does it a little
differently. It's pretty much impossible to structure that process because
that limits the potential to build something new and different.

What has gotten a lot better over the years is the off the shelf parts we can
bolt together and get started with. It amazes me how much code I depend on to
make an app and how many features it provides.

That's really the fun part of it.

