[sophacles]

I sort of agree, and sort of disagree.

It is possible to make misteps gracefully - that is, even when making mistakes you can mitigate the problems by writing clean code and trying to make it fit nice patterns you've already seen.

Sure, you can't copy directly, but you can get a feel for what is nice and isn't by looking at lots of code that has reached it's goal, and thus get an intuition for code smells.

Further, seeing how principles and patterns are used elsewhere helps take abstract concepts and turn them into real examples - for me anyway this is vital for my learning of anything.