Nothing wrong with having patience and helping new programmers, but my compassion ends there. :) I didn't know what I was doing when I started, but I learned

Nothing wrong with having patience and helping new programmers, but my compassion ends there. :) I didn't know what I was doing when I started, but I learned it's worth the effort to understand _why_ something works once it does. Not to try is passing the buck, and I've spent plenty of time on the receiving end. I've seen "shotgun" code written by developers with 20 years of experience, and boy does it suck to maintain that: "Wow, this code is messed up. This whole project is messed up. Wait, there's a weird edge case the author must not have considered. Hmmm, that has some side effects too. Crap, this can't be on purpose, but a bunch of other code touches this thing. Does any of it rely on this behavior?" With any luck, after burning a day studying a thousand lines of code, you realize that none of it does anything useful, and the bug you were chasing is hiding somewhere else. (Ok, I'm a little better at debugging than that, but you see the point.)