. (dot) philosophy: Cheating is not only OK, its THE way to go
How have I cheated in . ?
Use someone else's code
Of course, that's easier with CPAN to call upon.
Every time I have to add code to . in order to get it to do something, I look for a way to take it back out. This has become a habit. An obsession. And it works well. Bacause the other person's code resolves the issues that were not obvious at first glance.
Use someone else's ideas ...
... for instance, I've never written a line of Ruby code. But I have adopted one of the Ruby on Rails mantras: Convention over Configuration. In fact, its another obsession.