I had a hardtime remembering if I didn't understand.

But I tried an experiment at uni (once...) to learn a subject solely by rote. I could typically recall about 7 out of 10 items. I was astonished I could do it at all. Unfortunately, I lost all my usual strengths in that subject: unable to generalize, unable to justify, unable to adapt.

Re: software technologies: non-leaky abstractions are the way to understand without details. Algebras are a great example: arithmetic, concatenation, boolean, Kleene, relational. Although they still leak (overflow, PCRE, etc), an idealized core plus ad-hoc crap beats all-crap. jq has an algebra of , and | operators (though it doesn't call it that)

\aside git: I wonder if git internals can be interpreted as an algebra (absent in UI)? TBF I tried to design a programming language around git internal operations (tree navigation and construction), but it was tedious to use. Maybe something analogous to a declarative SQL over relational algbra would solve this?