Re: [tlug] New programming revision site - by a TLUG'er

[黒鉄章 <akira@example.com>]

Hi Fredric,

   thanks for the candid feedback.

 

a web site- www.plrev.org ....

With all this I would say that I would never bother to remember stuff

that can a) be easily found in the documentation (like function calls)

 

.... I almost [try not burden my] memory with too much details.

Having discussed this many times I think that we all share this idea, that it's not worth taxing your memory with minor details. That's what I said. That's what all my friends and colleagues said.

Then, I went to job interviews. And you know what, interviewers nearly never think that. They really believe that if you can't remember the trivial differences, e.g. SQL's substring function's start pos parameter is 1-indexed rather 0-indexed, that you were clearly lying about having built data warehouses.

"No", you say, "it isn't so. Engineers are nice people." But it is so- go to a new company and the existing staff try to measure your technical skills only against the subset that they use. I once answered a question about the general aspects of C# in part by comparing it to other languages such as Java and C++ (more a contrast to the latter, of course). The look on the face of the C# 'guru' just told me straight away he thought that was idiotic as answering an algebra question with an essay on 17th century music. He had his Microsoft Press textbook and if I didn't answer the same way I obviously wasn't capable of programming C#.

"Well", you say", "leave the one-trick ponies alone, you didn't need that job." But I _do_ need a job- I quit my last full-time job right at Lehman-shock <sigh>. So, I hope it'll be very useful for getting past these trivia-question hurdles.

Since I began this, however, I've also began to notice how many times I pull down my reference book. That's not healthy for my programming, taking a minute in the middle of one line to recall the correct function/directive/setting/etc. name. I could have finished the block of code I was writing in that time and keep more important stuff in my working memory.

Cheers,

Akira