Quote:
Originally Posted by calvin-c
I'm guessing information overload. When I started programming I could remember almost everything about a program. They were written in COBOL that only has about 70 pre-defined words...
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You could be right. When I learned C (in the beginning of the 90's) it was just 51 keywords, and a small standard library; Pascal was not much bigger. Nowadays, one does not only need to learn the keywords, but also (third party) libraries that have a megabazillion classes and functions.
And it's different for each language and framework. Not to mention all the other things used for software development (source control repository, IDE's, testing environments...)
I've actually stopped learning and remembering that stuff, because it's of no use; it's old in just a few years (or faster...), and then it often falls out of use. If I need it, I just look it up.
The same goes for basically everything: If there is no need to have something available as "instant knowledge at all times", I don't even bother remembering it. Maybe that's the reason why remembering books and movies and other things is also becoming harder. Maybe we (people) are not training ourselves to remember things anymore; we're training ourselves how to find what we need as fast as possible at the moment we need it.