Good Programmers Copy

“Ek Bagal mein Chand hoga , Ek Bagal mein Rotiyan….” the melody was buzzing deep inside my ears through the ear buds. It was half past one, the afternoon timing, when you try hard to keep yourself awake.And, once you put ear buds on , you can the feel the world off ! Some people still manage to find the whole day refreshing, and I am certainly not one of them.

In the mean time I could sense somebody was calling my name. Putting the dream of, both ‘Chand’ and ‘Rotiyan’ aside, I managed to  I snuck around the neighboring co-worker. I could see him working on some hot issues , he faced during our daily job: ‘coding’- what we call it as.

“I got a problem for you. Here is piece of code that I had, exactly  copied from the code snippet, you had written earlier. But I am getting some kind of issues with this piece of code. Can you check and tell me , what the issue is ?” 

I managed to give him  a ghost of nod. Sniffing around of his piece of code, I could found nothing of my interest.

“Okay, leave it I will find it by myself, he mumbled.

“Yes sure . Also let me know what is the problem”.

Meanwhile, the phone rang, displaying an unknown number at screen.

“Hallo!”

All I could hear was a distant person’s voice chattering across the other side of the phone.

“Please, speak in English on Hindi.”

“I am already speaking in English, Sir.”

I figured out,the accent of English, was totally different to what we Indians speak. And for we, all English accent, other than Indian are hard to grasp.

“Hi ! I am calling from Kindle customer services UK . You had raised a request for replacement of your Kindle device, as you had mentioned that some of the keys on your device are malfunctioning.”

“Yes that’s true.”

“Okay. So for security reasons I request you to add the payment details on your account in amazon.com. You should have a valid credit/debit card for filling up those details.”

”Can you please call me tomorrow or may be day after tomorrow as I don’t have the credit card details right now.”

Getting a positive response from the other side of the phone , I hung it up.

“Hey ! I think you have forgotten all the coding logic , you had implemented some days ago.” the neighboring person said sarcastically.

“Who remembers the logic implemented codes, that was written two months ago.” I replied, giving a wounded look to him.

“You ,even can’t explain the solution of the problem which I had mentioned you, sometime earlier. You must have copied and pasted all the code snippets from somewhere else.”  he argued.

“Definitely I had copied and pasted a lot of code snippets, but that was a successful copy and paste. And you did the same thing, but yours is unsuccessful.” I  defended.

“ Its not all about copying and pasting, there are some concepts behind coding.” he said, more irritably this time.

“That concept part may called Programming , but The ‘Coding’ seems to be nothing more than a successful copy and paste or a lucky hit and trial.”

It let me reminded the the famous statement of the cofounder of Apple,  Steve jobs:

“Good Programmers copy, but great programmers steal ideas. Every novice can be a coder but it takes years to become a programmer, and some people can not make it, till the end.”

Later on, he asked me , whether should he include the update of  work done by me, for the day, as ‘copied and pasted codes’.

“Of course! You can, but append the word “Successfully”  as a prefix.”