Memorisation is also just not that useful in my day to day as a programmer. I mean, sure, it’s great when I know something off the top of my head, but I have au

Memorisation is also just not that useful in my day to day as a programmer. I mean, sure, it’s great when I know something off the top of my head, but I have autocomplete and reference material and an interactive shell and whatnot. In uni, we had one particular class where we were supposed to study something like ten or twelve different concurrent algorithms in some weird concurrent language that I’ve forgotten and not seen since, and would be asked to write four of them out in the test and talk about them a bit. We didn’t know in advance which four, so most people tried to memorise as many of them as they could and hoped that the four that came up would be among them. Me, being stubborn, thought that was too much effort. Instead, I learned the bare minimum about the language so I could wing it in the test and write it up myself. I already programmed as a hobby so thinking critically about problems wasn’t a big deal. My code was a bit weird, because, for example, I only learned the syntax for while loops and not for loops, so had to make do with what I did know, but it didn’t matter which four problems came up. The problem description gave me enough to figure it out. I got really good marks in that class and put substantially less effort into preparing for the test than my classmates did. My point, I guess, is that memorisation is a stupid thing to optimise for (I guess it’s harder to design good tests that can’t be best beaten by memorisation), isn’t that useful in “real life” and is a lot more work than if you were thought the actual building blocks so that the students have a toolbox they can use to approach problems.