[Maxatar]

Isnt the point of the article that blindly copying and pasting this code leads to the wrong answer?

I agree many developers do blindly copy and paste things off the Internet, but I don't think that's something to desire or celebrate.

[ctoth]

The point of this article is this person punishes people who copy and paste the code ... into their python interpreter to check.

How many cases have you faced in your real job where this has happened?

[Maxatar]

So I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd fire someone for copying and pasting code, but it's definitely part of my company's culture that copying and pasting code off of a website, and especially executing it, is something heavily discouraged to the point that it doesn't really happen at my job.

I'm perfectly happy to use Stack Overflow and other resources/tutorials, blog posts etc... to find solutions to problems, but just instinctively I would never think to copy and paste a solution from these sites and incorporate it into my codebase and I sure as heck wouldn't think to execute code from some untrusted site I happened to come across.

But this may also be a consequence of the domain I work in where we take security very seriously.

[array_key_first]

You can tell how safe a code snippet is from reading it.

Like, there's no way you're going to copy a 20 line algorithm from stack overflow on balancing a red-black tree and have it encrypt your harddrive.

Obviously you still need to test the code to make sure it works and understand what it's doing, but there is very little security risk here. Just look up the functions youre using and understand the code and you're fine.