Editing Copy-and-paste programming (section)

== Origins ==
Copy-and-paste programming is often done by inexperienced or student programmers, who find the act of writing code from scratch difficult or irritating and prefer to search for a pre-written solution or partial solution they can use as a basis for their own problem solving.<ref name="inexperienced">
{{cite journal
|url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1272896&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=30889213&CFTOKEN=55540185
|title=Revisiting Novice Programmers Errors
|year=2007
|publisher=acm.org
|doi=10.1145/1272848.1272896
|accessdate=2008-06-04
|last1=Yarmish
|first1=Gavriel
|last2=Kopec
|first2=Danny
|journal=ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
|volume=39
|issue=2
|pages=131–137
|s2cid=8854303
|url-access=subscription
}}
</ref>
(See also [[Cargo cult programming]])

Inexperienced programmers who copy code often do not fully understand the pre-written code they are taking. As such, the problem arises more from their inexperience and lack of [[Extreme programming#Courage|courage in programming]] than from the act of copying and pasting, per se. The code often comes from disparate sources such as friends' or co-workers' code, [[Internet forum]]s, open-source projects, code provided by the student's professors/TAs, or [[computer science]] textbooks. The result risks being a disjointed clash of styles, and may have superfluous code that tackles problems for which new solutions are no longer required.

A further problem is that [[Computer bug|bug]]s can easily be introduced by assumptions and design choices made in the separate sources that no longer apply when placed in a new environment.

Such code may also, in effect, be unintentionally [[Obfuscated code|obfuscated]], as the names of variables, classes, functions and the like are typically left unchanged, even though their purpose may be completely different in the new context.<ref name="inexperienced"/>

Copy-and-paste programming may also be a result of poor understanding of features common in computer languages, such as loop structures, functions and subroutines.