The body of work that's focused on making programming easier, faster, and more efficient is immense and purposely includes code examples that are designed to be copied and pasted and configured. If you know how to use them you are programming. If you don't, well, you won't get far.<p>Once you understand the basics of programming you can apply them to any language so the problem becomes the syntax they use and really, if you focus on learning that on a "need to know" basis you can be productive even without being fluent by using a "copy-paste-configure" approach.<p>The end goal is to produce something so, in short, it's smart to leverage that huge body of work and, in fact, clearly wasteful to ignore it.