> if you cannot create it, you are simply borrowing someone else's idea and treating it like your own.
With the understanding, of course, that this isn't necessarily a bad thing! Understanding is certainly useful, but if it works, then it works, regardless of who built it. Reimplementing, say, a standard library will make you a better programmer, but if just including libraries to do the heavy lifting produces a working system, then that has value too. There are only so many hour in the day; there's value in knowing when to just hand-wave the giants whose shoulders you stand on.
With the understanding, of course, that this isn't necessarily a bad thing! Understanding is certainly useful, but if it works, then it works, regardless of who built it. Reimplementing, say, a standard library will make you a better programmer, but if just including libraries to do the heavy lifting produces a working system, then that has value too. There are only so many hour in the day; there's value in knowing when to just hand-wave the giants whose shoulders you stand on.