Arbitrary things like obscure names, weird parameter orderings, mutated inputs, etc are all the sorts of gotchas that can be learned up-front if you care to know them before being bitten.

An example for Python is the del statement `del d[key]` which I find arbitrary and non-intuitive.

Actually when learning any language I usually learn the collections usages early--these would be good to memorize rather than repeatedly looking up and learning case-by-case as a time saving (non flow state breaking) measure.

For Swift it was all the weird call forms with keyword/symbols that move around rather than being additional parts of a complete form.

Other things - well, there is Google, there is StackOverflow, and now - also ChatGPT with GPT-4.

Sure, it might not be enough for learning (at least, not for everyone), but well enough to avoid needless memorization. Memorization always comes at some opportunity cost of using time (and, well, brain capacity) for something more fruitful, e.g., learning good programming patterns, wise abstractions, etc.

I'm fluent in Python, but had spent most of my time in 2.x. When I had to finally switch to 3.x, I went through all the 3.x release notes for new capabilities. One thing stood out: scandir was the preferred method compared to os.walk.

There's no way I'll remember that and I'd be too lazy to Google it. So it went into SRS.

Ditto for concurrent.futures (broke my habit of using multiprocessing directly).

The other use case for SRS and programming languages: There are always languages I use only occasionally (e.g. Emacs Lisp) So I'll never develop muscle memory. Using SRS significantly boosted my Elisp capabilities.

I don't code in JS, but I decided to take a course on it and put a lot of the stuff in SRS. I've almost never used JS since, but a coworker is using it in a project we're both working on. I was looking at his code, and pointed out to him various alternatives that he wasn't aware of (e.g. newer features since the time he learned it). Definitely would not have been able to do it without SRS. I can mostly read/understand his code. Again, almost entirely due to SRS.

This is a fantastic use case that I hadn’t thought of.

One big problem with DSLs is that unless you use them on a near daily basis, you’ll keep forgetting how to use them. They really need to be worth the memorization cost that they introduce to a system. But SRSs can help.

Spaced repetition isn't about learning, it's about remembering. From the article:

> Flash cards are for remembering what you’ve learned.

Flash cards are great for something that you don't use often but still want to remember. I use it a lot for CLI options (docker, ripgrep, etc), parts of the standard library that are useful once in a while but not always, algorithms, editor shortcuts. It also means that when you switch environments you can still remember everything.

Without chat AI, or an expert Q&A forum, it is difficult to search for the best solution for a complex problem articulated in its entirety.

What will end up happening is that you will convert your Y problem into multiple smaller X problems and search for how to solve those. You will design the solution to the problem in the abstract language of your mind using these smaller steps, and then map those steps to the programming language. You can much more easily look up smaller steps such as "find the index of a character in a string".

By the time you get to these small steps, you're imagining a detailed solution, whereas the language could offer something more direct.

One tell tale sign of this is code that contains functions which have exact equivalents in the standard library.

When you ask the programmer why they didn't use the library functions or built in syntax they will often say, oh I looked for something like that, but didn't find it; it was faster to just write the code than to look for it.