Looping isn't "cheating" if you know what you're doing. But if you blindly do that from the beginning without ever learning how rhythm really works, then you're going to be lost when things get more complicated.

And the same is true of the dev who copies tons of code from stack overflow without really understanding it. When issues like thread safety of the app come up, that dev is going to be lost.

Experienced musicians choose loops and samples understanding full well the trade-offs of quantization and timbre. Experienced devs bring in libraries understanding the trade-offs. Answering the question "how well do I need to know this library before introducing it in production?" is a really, really hard problem.

In practice, I see junior devs blindly copying code that subtly won't work more than I see them writing their own DI system because of not-invented-here syndrome. But, admittedly, the latter tends to be more destructive.

School teaches us that reusing someone elses code is cheating, and using a library would be cheating in a work interview. But using a library is actually standard practice, even when you are paid per hour. Doing anything from scratch will take a lot or research and or trail and error. Even basic stuff we take for granted, like putting text on the screen. eg fonts Unicode graphical driver, etc.

Three things:

1. I have no idea why "hacking" aka "going fast and breaking things" is so glorified while "building good reliable programs" aka "good programming" is not.

2. How come that someone thinks of himself/herself that he/she has the right to say who is a "true hacker" and who is not.

3. AND THIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX5Xy3a2uJU Thank you Jayson.