If you’ve run into someone being referred to a cargo cult programmer, this is where that comes from:
During the Second World War, the Americans set up airstrips on various tiny islands in the Pacific. After the war was over and the Americans went home, the natives did a perfectly sensible thing — they dressed themselves up as ground traffic controllers and waved those sticks around. They mistook cause and effect — they assumed that the guys waving the sticks were the ones making the planes full of supplies appear, and that if only they could get it right, they could pull the same trick. From our perspective, we know that it’s the other way around — the guys with the sticks are there because the planes need them to land. No planes, no guys.
The cargo cultists had the unimportant surface elements right, but did not see enough of the whole picture to succeed. They understood the form but not the content. There are lots of cargo cult programmers — programmers who understand what the code does, but not how it does it. Therefore, they cannot make meaningful changes to the program. They tend to proceed by making random changes, testing, and changing again until they manage to come up with something that works.
Here’s the wikipedia entry on Cargo cult: link
I like this detail left out of my copy paste job: “They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in control towers.”
This all comes through Eric Lippert’s Fabulous Adventures in Coding
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!