Curry's copy-paste culture

Adam Curry's essay, Copy-Paste Culture, details his thoughts on how humans are geared to learn by copying and the relation to weblogs.

Weblogs, you see, are merely an extension of a tool that mankind has used since he first roamed earth beating tree trunks in Africa.

It is based on our inherent nature to copy.

I like this. Even before weblog tools came into the fore, people were sharing / copying web links in the form of lists of links. Sometimes it was straight copy, and other times they included commentary. Perfect examples.

To extend his analogy of learning by copying, most of my knowledge of programming tricks and technique comes from copying other people's code and extending what they have done. Classroom education only takes me so far.