Code Copypasta – Ethical?

I have come across a dilemma that I’m sure all programmers/software engineers have come across or will come across in their career. It’s not a proud admission but it’s an admission even my mentor/lecturer admits, he doesn’t understand the math to his code. But it’s quite alright he says, you don’t actually need to understand the math to accomplish what you’re doing. I was also really surprised he said HE copy and pasted his code from someone else, this was by someone who was charging money for an Udemy course.

That leaves me no choice but to just copy and paste too, which is a shame because only on a very high level do I understand things. And by that, I mean for some algorithms I have absolutely no clue what’s happening. It’s not just a simple matter of looking in the module documentation either, it’s legit trying to understand matrix multiplication and algorithms that have squiggles, gamma, delta and every Greek symbol in them.

I’ll give credit where credit is due and make sure to painstakingly reference people but it still feels like cheating. I guess this is what people mean when they say “script-kiddies” ruined a website, kids like myself messed with tools that they don’t understand.