Perhaps part of why I don’t like doing programming the “hard way” is that is the way I learned back in the 80’s when there weren’t any fancy IDEs. Of course, I highly customized my text editor to make my work easier. If you’ve ever read Robert Heinlein’s short story The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail in his book Time Enough for Love you’ll find part of my philosophy in it.

What I like about your response is that you indicate that use of such high level tools doesn’t make you less of a developer, and that the use of the right tool for the job is what a good developer should be able to do.

I agree that memorization does have its place. What I don’t like to see is the encouraged cramming with the goal of passing a few tests to get a certification. (This problem extends beyond just programmer certification and well into the general educational system but that’s for another time on a different blog.) I don’t think that most people retain a significant amount of this knowledge much beyond the testing period nor, given the degree of change, does it remain current and valuable for more than a few years if they do retain it.

What you get by memorizing is that you slow yourself as you learn, and then you may become a little faster - the problem is you’d be missing stuff you didn’t learn (things created by others which are not part of the platform). not to mention that at the end of the day it isn’t really about lines of code. It is about working, maintainable and tested lines of code which really factor out the time saves on initial coding

Arnon

My thinking is to use all of the tools and resources available, especially if you’re a working professional. Today’s IDEs make it easy for anyone with decent programming skills and experience to pick up a new language and be productive in it quickly. I don’t consider them crutches but very useful tools for rapid discovery. Unless one wants to be a “language lawyer” in a particular language there really isn’t a need to learn every nuance of it by heart since massive amounts of reference material is instantly available at your fingertips.

Learning ‘the hard way’ is OK for an absolute beginner in an academic environment studying the basics but, if one is out in the real world you hopefully have already learned these lessons. Maybe that’s what David was getting at, that he’s met people who didn’t learn these lessons the first time around. I agree with him on that point, if that’s the case. If one doesn’t have the fundamentals down they won’t be an effective programmer.

But I would like to add that I agree to both of you. The reason why I agree to David is: programming in text redactor while you are learning to program can help you very much. With this approach you can learn ins and outs, and know the language by heart.

On the other hand, the reason why I agree to you is, that you need to learn programming not the language.

I could say that I am Java programmer, but I could do programming in C# with a manual and API documentation but I would be dead slow…

You need to be and know a little from both :)

P.S. Excuse me for my English