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by criddell 2871 days ago
I learned a lot of programming back in the 80's by typing in programs from magazines. It was great until you got to the page of DATA statements...
2 comments

Yes. And while some can type in code in order to learn programming, to others everything looks like those DATA statements. Why can't we respect different learning styles? Plenty of people have learned via copy-paste or by "find the bug," in already transcribed code, etc.
Plenty of people have learned via copy-paste

In my experience, that almost always means "for sufficiently small values of 'learned'." These are the people who can glue stuff together and make something that seems to work, but are completely lost when it comes to debugging or even just writing original code.

In IT there are some absolute gurus who learned that way. There isn't time to do much but Google things, because of the broad assortment of problems that crop up. What you're missing is T, the variable that gives these people the experience to start recognizing patterns in the snippets and building their own original solutions, building their own template libraries, frameworks, etc. You may not code that way, but like I said, people learn differently... Original logic vs. referential logic are like yin and yang; they eventually balance each other out no matter the starting point. You can just as easily point at those who write original code and say they are the ones with the perennial NIH attitude; to whom Googling is a misuse of the human brain, even if it could save hundreds of man-hours.
Assembly hexdumps were worse variation of that.