Don’t actually know what the product is and why it might be valuable to me.
Sure is pretty though.
::looks at bootstrap hero styling::
Oh, right.
If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work.
It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters.
This seems like the web design version of this.
In any case, why is it "a bit tough to say this"? You thought your ability to learn was irreproducible?
https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...
Edit: Which you might know well enough. Just wanted to add some more context.
I vehemently disagree that this happens. What you see is the end result, and thinking and struggling through for each element is not present. It is like copying the Mona Lisa and claiming the relationship with the sitting model and her smell and feel and complaints about cramped neck is all in the copied painting.
(Please do not change the cursor, specially the size. There is a reason I changed it.)
With Software in particular, I often encounter designs that copy a pattern from another popular piece of software, but without critically thinking about what the pattern is for or if it's even appropriate for their system, or even worse, assuming that because it exists and is popular that it must be good, when in fact it's terrible.
If recreating someone else's creation truly learned us, I believe the world would be a tremendously better place.
I used to run a lunch study group where we took some old crusty load bearing software, read the documentation thoroughly, and then dissected it, reading source and comments and trying to distill what it achieved well separate from what it achieved in spite of itself.
We learned a lot.
The very definition of "cargo cult" in a software context.
When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
'E went an' took - the same as me!
The market-girls an' fishermen,
The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
They 'eard old songs turn up again,
But kep' it quiet - same as you!
They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,
An' 'e winked back - the same as us!
- Rudyard KiplingThere is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things that others have discovered.
Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/
If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right.
https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html
I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.
Today most things are complex, and they don’t last very long. I wanted to pick apart something that’s lasted since the birth of the internet. Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.
According to pg who is an unreliable narrator at the best of times.
I'd say Navisoft[0] might be a better candidate.
If you think it’s easy, or even possible without investing months, I invite you to try.
As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong?
The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.
Likewise, taking elements from many influences and combining them involves a lot of creative choices about which pieces to take from which influence while copying one thing exactly involves no creative choices and is just reusing someone else's effort. It's the difference between baking someone a cake or getting one from the store.