Pro tip: I spent 7 months copying code by hand before I figured out what Ctrl+C actually does

Sage Palmer · 2026-09-16T00:25:04.56542+00:00

I feel kinda dumb admitting this but I've been learning Python since January and I was straight up retyping every example from the book into my editor, line by line, letter by letter. My buddy Marcus came over last Tuesday and watched me do it for like 20 minutes before he just stared at me and asked why I wasn't copying and pasting. I told him I thought that was cheating and he laughed so hard he almost fell off my couch. He pulled up the official Python docs and the whole tutorial literally says to copy the samples into your own file and mess with them. Turns out I was so worried about doing it wrong that I made it 10 times harder on myself. I typed out a 40 line function three separate times because of little typos and it took me almost an hour. Now I just paste it, run it, and then change one thing at a time to see what breaks. Did anyone else start out thinking that shortcuts in your editor were somehow against the rules?

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Pro tip: I spent 7 months copying code by hand before I figured out what Ctrl+C actually does | Coding For Beginners - Talk Freely