I was trying to speak figuratively, not literally. Any programmer will need to look at source code to solve problems, but that's not what I was getting at.

When you're taking a math quiz, the goal is to learn how to solve math problems, not bypassing the quiz.

What I really should have said is that in life, shortcuts aren't always appropriate. If you're an engineer confronted with the task of calculating the load the bridge can take, you're supposed to do the hard slog of calculating how much the bridge will take. Let's suppose that engineer didn't understand math, but simply cheated their way through University and took a guess - will you be stepping foot on the bridge?

Teaching kids it's okay to take inappropriate shortcuts is bad, because in the real world, inappropriate shortcuts can have nasty consequences.

Yeah. There's bizarre situations where 'view source' shouldn't really be necessary/beneficial and yet somehow it's a handy life skill. I remember doing it while booking a flight on RyanAir (Very bad website. I knew the option to not pay for extra insurance had to be on the page somewhere!)