[WaitWaitWha]

> When you recreate someone’s creation, you learn their story: every piece of brilliance, tradeoff, and imperfection.

I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the copied painting.

(Please do not change the cursor, specially the size. There is a reason I changed it.)

[xyzzy_plugh]

I agree. In fact, it's even worse: often times you miss the tradeoffs.

With Software in particular, I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.

If recreating someone else's creation truly learned us, I believe the world would be a tremendously better place.

I used to run a lunch study group where we took some old crusty load bearing software, read the documentation thoroughly, and then dissected it, reading source and comments and trying to distill what it achieved well separate from what it achieved in spite of itself.

We learned a lot.

[antonvs]

> I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.

The very definition of "cargo cult" in a software context.

[omnimus]

I think you romanticize it quite a bit. Painters/artists like any professionals are mostly there just to do the work. Even with Mona Lisa It's very likely that nobody that day cared about smell of the model it was just one other day at the office.

What copying does really teach you is how to actually put the paint on the canvas, how to actually make the image, how to see the details. That's the reason why copying is one of the most common learning techniques in visual arts.

Good luck painting by smelling the emotions and atmosphere of the moment.