I can run the code in my head. I can probably be right. I can be 99.9999% sure I am right.
OR:
I could run the code in the interpreter and be 100% certain.
I know what attitude I would prefer out of my developers.
OR:
I could run the code in the interpreter and be 100% certain.
I know what attitude I would prefer out of my developers.
I agree many developers do blindly copy and paste things off the Internet, but I don't think that's something to desire or celebrate.
How many cases have you faced in your real job where this has happened?
I'm perfectly happy to use Stack Overflow and other resources/tutorials, blog posts etc... to find solutions to problems, but just instinctively I would never think to copy and paste a solution from these sites and incorporate it into my codebase and I sure as heck wouldn't think to execute code from some untrusted site I happened to come across.
But this may also be a consequence of the domain I work in where we take security very seriously.
Like, there's no way you're going to copy a 20 line algorithm from stack overflow on balancing a red-black tree and have it encrypt your harddrive.
Obviously you still need to test the code to make sure it works and understand what it's doing, but there is very little security risk here. Just look up the functions youre using and understand the code and you're fine.