[sureglymop]

The best programmer I know very often codes in a simple notepad like text editor with no syntax highlighting or any kind of other help. Purely plain text.

He does this mainly when trying to show/explain something to someone in code and when initially drafting something. Not for full blown projects.

I still find it interesting though, because I personally don't nearly have good enough memory to even do that. I have to look things up constantly and rely on auto completion.

[mnsc]

I have normal memory but my interpretation of the worst programmer I've worked with is that he had extraordinary memory and used that to write extremely tangled code but due to remembering every call site and randomly named function he thought the code base was flawless. And the expectation was that efter he explained a piece of code once then I too should have committed that to memory and then be able to recall it days later when it unexpectedly mattered when explaining a new piece of code. Failing to do that would lead to a "sigh, I'll explain it from scratch again". I don't really remember but I think he used intellij, but like a tabbed text editor. Always ctrl-shift-f "startoffunctionname".