The "just copy from Stack Overflow" advice is hurting beginners

I overheard a guy at a coffee shop last week telling a friend that all you need to learn coding is to copy and paste from Stack Overflow. That's terrible advice. I tried that when I started learning Python 3 months ago and ended up with code that worked but I had no idea why. When something broke, I couldn't fix it because I never understood the basics. Copying snippets without knowing what loops or functions actually do just sets you up to fail later. Has anyone else found that actually typing out code and breaking it on purpose taught them way more than copy pasting ever did?

2 comments

2 Comments

seth6831d agoMost Upvoted

My buddy Dave started learning JavaScript last year and went all in on copy-paste from Stack Overflow. Built a whole to-do list app that looked great until he tried to add a delete button and nothing worked. He spent three days trying to paste in different snippets that just broke it worse. Finally he started over from scratch, typing every line himself and looking up each function one at a time. That app took him two weeks but he said he actually understood how the pieces fit together after that.

lisaf381d ago

Same energy as people using meal kits but never learning to cook a real meal from scratch.