Comment by Jason Knight on "Have you ever had a coding black-out?"

I've been programming for four decades, and after all that time I still say the #1 skill good programmers have is the ability to research, looking stuff up as they need it.

You cannot possibly remember every little bit of minutia, and as Dean Witcraft said the more languages you know the more this is true.

There is no shame in having to look something up. That's just part or the trade. Same as how there's no shame in asking questions. As I said recently in another thread smart people go look things up or ask for help when they don't know something.

"Ignorant" isn't an insult, it just means you don't know. You can fix ignorant.

re: research - Absolutely true that this is a top skill assuming you have the ability to assess and decompose the problem domain. I research almost daily for all kinds of things besides just refreshing my memory on syntax differences. I'm constantly on the lookout for new ways to solve particularly sticky problems and frequently look for new approaches to things I already know how to do. It keeps my skills current.

Look at any lawyer's office and you'll see shelf upon shelf of law books, despite their spending years at law school to perfect their trade. Unless you're in a coding interview, it's not about what you know, it's about knowing what you don't know, and knowing where to find out.

I've been known to google some really basic stuff just because I'm jumping between multiple languages for a single project, and it's faster and easier to google whether I need to use '+' or '&' for string concatenation than it is to disrupt my flow by taking a chance and then having to backtrack to fix it later.

This is what I am doing every single day ^^

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