Yep! And a lot of his concerns and contempt for the written word were addressed by the post-structuralists later, so citing Socrates as evidence here is pretty

Yep! And a lot of his concerns and contempt for the written word were addressed by the post-structuralists later, so citing Socrates as evidence here is pretty dang old-fashioned indeed. A lot of the other comments here would find his viewpoint sympathetic though; if your concern is that new tools increase the rate of syntax errors and spelling mistakes in programmers, the case is obvious. But can I controversially suggest that once we learned to write, we may've traded away some of our memory, but in order to gain an enhanced capacity for reflection and development of thought? Writing freed us from the burden of remembering as much so we could apply that energy to creativity instead. Likewise in programming, I'm happy to trade not being able to memorise and internalise a language's grammar if my IDE helps me accomplish the task more easily. I can focus on devising a solution rather than focus on nesting a parenthesis correctly. I appreciate there's a certain pride in doing these things without fault, but for the 95% of us who program to solve problems, the busywork can go.