This mentality works in general, but there are drawbacks. A large part of your problem solving ability is unconscious. If you don't have critical pieces of information committed to memory, you're essentially creating a ceiling on the types of problems you're capable of solving.

This might be the most insightful comment I've read on HN. I think this is the point people either miss or don't bother to address when claiming that they can just search for "arcane" facts instead of memorizing them.

In at least some cases, you can get by with having only the solution metadata committed to memory. For example, you might remember various data structures and their time complexity well enough to select the proper one, without necessarily being able to implement them all from memory.

But you better remember how to verify your memory is correct, at least via research if not working it out yourself.

In the end, you can either turn the information into a program or you cannot.

> my memory is limited

This is tangental, but I find this an interesting topic - your memory not limited, at least not the way most people think it is. To be accurate - a body of experiments has failed to turn any evidence for old knowledge preventing formation of new knowledge, or new knowledge pushing out the old.

What prevents formation of new knowledge is time - you could learn A or B, but not both at the same time. What makes us forget piece A is not the piece B committed after A, but absence of repetition of A. If you repeat A every so often, you will remember it equally well regardless of whether you also repeat B or not during the same period.

I get my information from this book, which in turn has references to all of the underling studies: http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/...

i agree, memory is not limited in that sense. a better analogy is memory in some sense is sorted. topics that are used daily are generally near the 'front' of the que while older topics slowly fade to the background.

when fading to the background i envision a bubble forming around certain topics allowing one to use and reference them unconsciously at a macro level, but leaving the micro information hidden.

an example would be when i worked in games and did a ton of 3d math to animate and move objects around the world. at the time i was a gameplay programmer these ideas where at the tip of my fingers. i didn't have to think twice about matix multiplications, dot products, vector projections.

currently i work on ios/android development. i don't use 3d math much when deving any more. if you were to quiz me, i may not be able to implement or use those ideas very easily. a few weeks working with the same topics would bring them back to the forefront.

i learned all the sorting algorithms in college. i could probably implement a couple, but most of them i don't recall immediately or at all since i rarely care about the efficiency of the data i sort these days. i know of their existence, but to a degree that is all. if i were in a position where sorting was important, i would make sure to educate myself to appropriately.

i google almost everything. there are rarely days when i don't google something for work. learning is infinitely fun. i think being able to research a problem and find a solution is as valuable if not more as already knowing the solution.

Long term memory might not be limited but short term working memory is certainly limited. The short term working memory is important in solving problems in general.

This is actually an argument for committing those "arcane facts" to memory. The more of a concept you have internalized, the fewer slots it takes up in working memory when solving a problem, thus increasing your problem solving capacity.

You don't need to, but you should be able to recall them quickly when a problem starts to look like something already solved. There are a lot of developers who rewrite everything or whose lack of familiarity with the ins and outs of their language or how to apply simple algorithms leads them to come up with really complicated solutions to simple problems.