To quote the original source that Wiki cites and is derived from: > A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program st

To quote the original source that Wiki cites and is derived from: > A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo programming}). This is categorically different than the kinds of copypasta that TFA is talking about, and it's different in that the copypasta in TFA does serve a purpose. There's a world of difference between copying something whose implementation you don't understand but whose function you do understand versus copying something which you vaguely associate with a particular outcome. https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.9.6.dos.txt https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.9.6.dos.txt