Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code

shockoe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 184 posts

Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code

#71

Post by mikeash »

tomasien wrote: post #68
mikeash wrote: post #66

Can't reach the site, but I completely agree with the title. I'll even retype my own code when refactoring things a lot of the time, just to make sure I understand what I'm slinging around.

sorry dude, server wasn't ready for it :( http://tommy.authpad.com/don-t-copy-and-paste-other-people-s...

The title captured the pertinent part, at least. Still agree after reading the whole thing. Thanks for the working link.

Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code

#72

Post by nileshk »

I agree with this especially when you are doing tutorials for this reason: when you type out code, you inevitably make typos that cause bugs. This forces you to learn what some of the common possible error conditions are and forces you to learn to find and resolve them. Learning these things when you have the safety net of a tutorial is ideal, because if you can't figure it out you can always compare with the tutorial's code and learn what your mistake was, and you still get the benefit of learning about the particular error you experienced.

Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code

#73

Post by pencoyd »

tomasien wrote: post #63
pencoyd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just reached out via email to the site owner with some info/tips. We want to help. CloudFlare doesn't cache HTML by default, though you can enable that with Page Rules. http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-advanced-ca... And the origin needs to be responding long enough for us to keep a copy in cache, once the Page Rule is enabled.

Thanks, appreciate it. Are you with Cloudflare?

Yes, I work at CloudFlare.

Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code

#75

Post by dschiptsov »

When you're re-writing the code from the video to you editor, you are mere copying, you're not inventing, not producing the code. But it is useful nevertheless. Copy-pasting makes you dumber, while re-writing trains you, but very slowly.

http://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/HowTo

Eventually you must try to re-invent and re-write some of the classic procedures without trying to recall a memorized text.)

There are some immortal procedures: http://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Tutorial5 to re-invent.)

Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code

#78

Post by prof_hobart »

morsch wrote: post #33

That may be an effective way to learn (ie. it works), but I have my doubts that it's a very efficient one (ie. you could learn more in the time you spend retyping that code) or a very entertaining one (ie. other ways of learning to code are more interesting).

You could create more, but whether you'd learn more is another matter. I know that whenever I've gone down the "copy a bit of code and modify it" route it's never sunk in as well as manually retyping it all.

Re: Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code

#80

Post by Derbasti »

nileshk wrote: post #72

I agree with this especially when you are doing tutorials for this reason: when you type out code, you inevitably make typos that cause bugs. This forces you to learn what some of the common possible error conditions are and forces you to learn to find and resolve them. Learning these things when you have the safety net of a tutorial is ideal, because if you can't figure it out you can always compare with the tutoria…

Also, I just love that clickedy-click and finger movement. Actually, both of the above are queues that can help the brain retain stuff.
Post reply on HN