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For me it's not only web development, is most of the CS stuff I need when coding.

Probably it is due to my training as a mathematician, but I usually just keep an index of what I know and what it's used for, but I don't remember the specific details. I.e. Implicit Function Theorem can be used for proofs involving X, Y and Z under hypotheses H, unless you are fancy and go for H2 and more work. I just know what I need and where I can look it up – Nirenberg for fancy, any basic Differential Analysis text for the others, that Russian book on my shelf for a neat simple proof, Moser's for a simple proof and application, the list goes on with 6 or more 7 items. Well, this is actually stretching it a little thin, I could prove the basic differential versions without much trouble, and some functional versions given enough hypotheses.

When coding I'm more or less the same. I know there's a Javascript function that returns true or false when matching against a regexp, I just don't remember its name. Since it's kind of shelved in my mind as regexp test, I just look for this, and it's hole in one. Once I learn something I may not remember it exactly, but I have a pretty good "indexed memory" in the fact that I know that piece of knowledge exists and I've seen it, so I only need a few moments to dig it up.

Of course, I'd rather remember all CSS selectors and rules, or most of the Javascript machinery and the Go standard library. But I'm not doing this every day, so I just use it, every time I do a little more sticks to memory and the rest is easily found. If it got me more than 1 minute to look something up, I'd stick a big post-it in front of me until it sank, so far I have not needed it.




Reminds me of the Einstein vs Edison story about Einstein not knowing the speed of sound when he tried the employee test that Edison had developed. I read a nice take on that here - http://www.scilogs.com/the_science_talent_project/einstein-v...


Another example of the same (or at least something similar) is Alexander Grothendieck. See http://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pdf (start at the last paragraph of page 1)

By the way: that text is in the past tense, not because Grothendieck has died, but because he retired from mathematics in a quite abrupt way. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck#Retireme...




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