It is primarily a pejorative term; those who use the term are often implying a lack of programming competence. It may also be the result of technology limitations (e.g., an insufficiently expressive development environment) as subroutines or libraries would normally be used instead. However, there are occasions when copy and paste programming is considered acceptable or necessary, such as for boilerplate, loop unrolling (when not supported automatically by the compiler), or certain programming idioms, and it is supported by some source code editors in the form of snippets.