I think this article glosses over quite a number of different things so the conclusion doesn't always follow. It says that people who copy stuff without thinki

I think this article glosses over quite a number of different things so the conclusion doesn't always follow. It says that people who copy stuff without thinking are consumers instead of creators. The implication is that this is wrong when many of us spend most of our time aggregating, not creating. Look at a load of game shows, how many are creative? Not many, most are simply aggregations but done in a way that makes the sum much better than its parts. However, if you then ignore that and look at what they say about this copying. Again, the tone is that it is wrong to copy without "a bit of skepticism" but you know what? Sometimes I don't care. I need to know how to extract something from a string, I find an example, it works, the need to analyze it might well be a waste of time. Might there be a faster/more efficient way? Probably but that will take even more time to find to save some CPU that is not worth the investigation. There is also an implication that most of this copying is related to appeal to authority e.g. I will copy this because person X is experience or highly regarded but again, I don't believe that at all. I can't remember the last time in my nearly 30 years in the game that I looked out for a specific person because I believed their authority, most of the time I suspect we try and find the easiest article that meets our needs and perhaps seems a bit up to date. I don't care that nobody is perfect because anyone worth their chops should know that the code you copy from somewhere else often lacks context and information about trade-offs but we are trusted to make the call as to whether the risk is high enough that we need to go back to first principles. In most cases, it is more annoying for me for someone to waste time reinventing something than it is for someone to get something a bit less than perfect and maybe having to revisit it later.