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A guy in my Python class said copy pasting from Stack Overflow is cheating, and I think he's wrong
I've been coding for 6 months now and 90% of what I know came from reading other people's answers, then breaking them until I understood why they worked. Last week I spent 2 hours on a list sorting bug in my flashcard app before realizing the fix was one line I'd seen a dozen times on there. Where's the line between copying and learning, or is there even one?
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wright.leo1mo ago
Had a buddy in college who copied a whole function off there for a group project and got grilled by our TA. Turns out he could explain every single line of it, why it worked, and what he'd change. The TA let it go because the dude actually understood it. Meanwhile a kid who typed everything from scratch got dinged for code that barely ran. Copying is only cheating if you never stop to ask why the thing you pasted works. If you break it, poke at it, and can explain it later, that's just how most of us learned.
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