Programming and code

Every time I quit my job and left the company before, I thought I should keep the excellent code I wrote. I could use it in the future for the same or similar requirement, which would save a lot of time. So programming was just a matter of copying and pasting, I thought.

But every time I wanted to use and read the old code I wrote, I felt that the code was not so "excellent", I always wrote code again to implement the same or similar requirements. Because in the old code something was not considered yet, some code had bugs, or even some comment was not good.

The key point was that the aspects of my knowledge regarding those requirements had improved than before. So programming was not a work of copying and pasting, code was just a tool to implement the mind, it reflects what I thought about the requirement. Therefore what needed to be learned and improved was the knowledge of concrete requirements, not the code itself.