To be fair my memory has always been terrible. I loathed times tables at school. I still don't really know them. I just feel like if I need to know I'll use a calculator and if there isn't one available I'll have other problems like clean water and food! Having a general sense of 'size of' numbers was enough and I'm pretty good at maths.
I get that it impedes memorization but how does that scale to using new libraries which may lack documentation? I'm jealous of your memorization of those string methods, every time I switch to JavaScript I feel lost because I don't recall substr Vs subString Vs substring etc!
I know vi very well - but for programming, these days I use JetBrains, which for me is like having an assistant to do all the rote work that doesn’t actually contribute to the task I’m concentrating on.
Manually adding imports is not virtuous. Renaming a function is not virtuous. Searching across files in a project is not virtuous. They are just chores. That’s what we have computers for.
There are plenty of reasons people choose their editors and I fully respect those choices. But after using IDEs like JetBrains and VSCode for the last few years, vi feels like editing a video file using a hex editor.
>but how does that scale to using new libraries which may lack documentation?
it doesn't really that well which I guess is a drawback. I'm not dogmatic about it so what I usually do with a new larger codebase is I just open it in vscode, read around somewhat, look at the symbols and use that for a while and then when I'm kind of familiar with it I go back to emacs.
>I'm jealous of your memorization
it's was actually very difficult in the beginning and one of the reasons I started doing is because I noticed just how bad my memory and attention had gotten without tools. Even with other things, as a kid I could read for five hours straight and a few years ago I noticed I couldn't read for 30 minutes without distraction.
I get that it impedes memorization but how does that scale to using new libraries which may lack documentation? I'm jealous of your memorization of those string methods, every time I switch to JavaScript I feel lost because I don't recall substr Vs subString Vs substring etc!