[Almondsetat]

Have you ever seen a programmer who really understands C going to stackoverflow every time they have to use an fopen()? Memorization is part of understanding. You cannot understand something without it being readily available in your head

[onionisafruit]

Right, and a lot of them probably got that understanding by going to stackoverflow every time they needed to use fopen() until they eventually didn’t need to anymore.

In the book days, I sometimes got to where I knew exactly where on a page I would find my answer without remembering what that answer was. Nowadays I remember the search query I used to find an answer without remembering what that answer was.

[n4r9]

I wrote a long answer, but I realised that even advanced C users are unlikely to have memorised every possible value of errno and what they all mean when fopen errors. There's just no point as you can easily look it up. You can understand that there is a maximum allowable number of opened files without remembering what exact value errno will have in this case.

[lordnacho]

Yes, I have. I do it too, even some basic functions, I would look up on SO.

You really just need to know that there's a way to open files in C.

I don't think you can reach any sort of scale of breadth or depth if you try to memorize things. Programmers have to glue together a million things, it's just not realistic for them to know all the details of all of them.

It's unfortunate for the guy who has memorized all of K&R, but we have tools now to bring us these details based on some keywords, and we should use them.

[array_key_first]

I still look up PHP builtins often because they're so inconsistent. What comes first, the needle or the haystack?