[evanbubniak]

SRS and learning-by-doing aren't mutually exclusive, in fact, I find that doing them together is much more effective than doing either one individually.

The catch is that, in my experience, SRS won't help you learn material you've never seen or used before. For programming, I make Anki cards for a given language/library/algorithm during or after the process of actually implementing something with it; then I can add my own code snippets into the card. For natural languages, I make a card only after I've seen or had to look up a particular grammatical construction or vocab word; then I can add my own example sentence, or the context where I first saw the term, into the card. So long as I'm regularly reviewing, then even for rare idioms or vocab, I can remember things I last saw years ago.

SRS is not as effective if you're studying prebuilt material by rote without any other interaction with the content. Rather it should be one part of a broad portfolio of activities you do to learn. For coding it should complement things like implementing projects, learning new libraries, reading open source code, reading technical books on the subject and so on. For languages it should complement things like talking to native speakers, reading news articles in the target language, listening to podcasts etc. where you use content from your other things and turn them into Anki cards.