My first project used code from a library I didn't understand

Years ago, I grabbed a chunk of code from a public library to make my program run. It worked, but I never learned how it functioned, which felt like skipping a key step. Where do you draw the line between using help and actually learning the basics?

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taylorw897mo ago

My first Python script had a block of code I called 'the magic box' because I had no clue how it worked... I just knew deleting it made everything break. Pretty sure that's how most of us learned, honestly.

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hannah_owens717mo ago

Ha, @taylorw89, my 'magic box' was just a loop I copied and pasted blindly.

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hannah_owens717mo ago

Watched a friend copy a regex from Stack Overflow for a form validator. It worked perfectly until she needed to change the date format. Her whole script crashed because she had no idea what those slashes and brackets actually did.

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