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Copying others is a tried and true way of increasing your abilities. Painters don't just start out as masters, they often spend years copying other styles unti
by kbenson 7y ago
Copying others is a tried and true way of increasing your abilities. Painters don't just start out as masters, they often spend years copying other styles until they find what like themselves. There's only so much the human mind will come up with on its own, being presented with new problems in new domains, and how other people addressed them is one way of increasing ability.
Take the master of any domain, and their past is likely littered with experiments and copies of things that already exist, either because they thought they could do it better or because they wanted to understand that topic better.
- chobeat 7y agoFine, I'm questioning the idea that the goal should be to maximize an hypotethical "programming skill", something that I'm not sure it even exist, I can only see adherence to different subjective definitions of "clean", "orthogonal" or "simple". What's the point of writing aesthetically pleasing software if it sits unused on Github? If you're lucky you can aim at replacing some old tool doing exactly the same thing with the only added value of satisfying the endless desire for novelty of other programmers. Innovations in software are very rare and almost never come from trial and error but most often from academic research. Why should this endless machine of waste reproduce itself over and over?
- randomidiot666 7y agoWhat's the point of a professional violinist playing aesthetically pleasing music alone without an audience? The point is self improvement, self education. It is incredible that some people don't understand such basic things.