Podcast 331: One in four visitors to Stack Overflow copies code
Our April Fools prank taught us there is more than a kernel of truth to the old joke about borrowing software smarts from Stack Overflow. Kyle Pollard explains how we built the software behind the joke, and Cassidy Williams explains how we built the actual keyboard.
Episode Notes
You can check out our deep dive into the copy paste data here. We saw over 40 million copies in the two weeks worth of activity we analyzed.
Kyle Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada. You can find him on Github, Twitter, and his website.
There’s lots of info about Cassidy’s various projects at cassidoo.co. You can catch her coding live at @cassidoo, Thursdays at 12:30 PT/2:30 Central/3:30 Eastern.
Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is TJ Crowder, who answered the question: How can I see the source of built-in JavaScript functions?
Tags: the key, the stack overflow podcast
10 Comments
That’s what programmers do 🙂
kind of funny how it’s 1 in 4 visitors, i would have expected it to be something like 1 in 1.
Yep, maybe someone changed the results, corruption xd
3 out of 4 times the code isn’t worth copying… that’s pretty bad… lol…
Great Program/ I Thought i Was Back in The Military Were i Was Made A Geek’;
The real question is how often stackoverflow employees copy from stackoverflow
Full Stack Overflow Developer
1 in 4 visitors that would like to admit :p
The assumption that copying code from SO is somehow related to learning seems unfounded.
It’s certainly possible for someone to use copy-and-paste code from SO to learn something, but where’s the evidence that this actually happens?
I suggest that the purpose of stack overflow – the actual thing that it does and that it optimizes itself to do – is to make it possible to work as an engineer without actually understanding what you’re doing. What this means is that stack overflow exists to make all engineers, on average, more ignorant. Probably not something that’s very easy to admit, but if you’re using this site (or running it!) it’s probably worth being honest about whether you can honestly deny it.
I cannot hear a sound from all the podcast, I am using chrome and my volume is at 100% and the podcast indicates is speaking even the tab says “this tab is playing audio”
what could be wrong?