I almost named this post "I haven't written a line of code in years!" but that would not literally be true.
Actually I've written a lot of code, but probably as much (or more) has come to me through cut and paste from a Google search.
It struck me that what started as a helpful but infrequent technique to augment my work, has become the work itself. At first it was a line of code, then entire methods. But now GitHub (and SourceForge) have made the cloning of entire applications not only easy but allowable (and fun).
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Or is there?
I could spend the time to derive from first principals everything that I need to code, but why?
There is nothing new under the sun. All code has already been written.
And the code wants to be used. Coders themselves want their code to be used and re-used. It's why they post it. So there is no sin or crime committed.
But a new set of skills must be developed. Searching in the right way. Recognizing the good sources like StackOverflow and also recognizing the bad sources, like BigResource that just seem to aggregate StackOverflow posts but without the valuable rating system. Maybe we should be training developers in search and not in programming.
And where is the role of knowledge and memory? If we don't need to remember how to do anything - because we can look it up - then soon, we may be unable to remember, even when we wish to.
But it is just too useful to avoid. And so the term "Coding By Google" seems appropriate and even though I thought that I coined the term, turns out that this too is not new. Here's the earliest reference I could find.
bert's blog - from 2006
So go forth, code by Google, and be proud!
