Not really sure where the article is going but I will throw out two things: * "Never memorize something that you can look up in a book." * We may know about 1

Not really sure where the article is going but I will throw out two things: * "Never memorize something that you can look up in a book." * We may know about 10k-40k words depending on the study, person, etc, but can generally communicate any idea with those that we do. There's a ton of overlap and specialization that can be worked around with smaller, simpler pieces (Guy Steele's recently linked '98 OOPSLA talk on growing a language comes to mind...). The second point is pretty familiar when it comes to programming. Maybe you don't know the most efficient algorithm, the most maintainable strategy, the whizbang idiomatic language construct, etc. but that doesn't mean you can't "communicate" useful work to/through the code you do "know".