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> Isn't looking it up when you need it and sometimes remembering without looking it up already spaced repetitio? No. Spaced repetition takes a structured appro

• karmakaze 5y ago
  Yes, true. This is why I can never remember when '!' after a ruby method name does the thing I think it should, or the opposite. I haven't considered this to be worth taking time to commit to memory. Sure it would be faster, but each time I do the 5 second search. I've gone through so many languages in so many jobs/years that it's a very substitutable part of my thought processes. It would be like knowing assembly language when thinking in C. Knowing Ruby when I'm thinking in my imagined language constructs actually used to solve problems. Another data point was that when I switched keyboard layouts, the amount that I typed on a typical day was not nearly enough to learn the layout. What that showed me was that typing (e.g. writing syntax) was a very small part my job. Edit: just thought of a good way to illustrate an example. Instead of remembering what `after_commit` does, it is better to know that if I want something to happen when data is durably saved that there's a 'callback thing' in Rails that lets me do that. The important thing is the direction of the association. Any time I read 'after_commit' and don't know it, I can look it up. But if I needed two things to happen together without a concrete concept, I'm not likely to remember 'after_commit' unless I've already solved the problem a number of times. The idea is that the 'concept' should be the memory key rather than the syntax.