[skydhash]

The benefits of knowing regex is not about the syntax (that’s what docs/google/books are for), but knowing when it’s right to use it.

Immersion with the codebase is not about coding and syntax (which is actually very easy for me). It’s about being able to intuit that a particular combination can result in a buggy state and provides the wrong result downstream. You lose that you stay in the dreamland of specs.

[jghn]

That's fair. This all feels similar to the shift that happened when Google came on to the search scene. To use your example, people realized they no longer needed to memorize syntax. Instead they only needed to ensure they understood the big picture concepts, and they could fill in the blanks on demand with Google. This is all just moving that layer of abstraction one level higher.

[skydhash]

Not really. Before google, we had (and still have) books. What the internet and later google changed was the availability of information (If I had to rely on libraries and bookstores, I'd never be a programmer today). The job was never about memorizing knowledge, only the application of it. That has not changed since the dawn of computing.

[jghn]

Sort of. As a developer I had my stack of reference books, man pages, etc. I’d try hard to memorize syntax as it was a pain to look things up. And I also devoted some memory to remembering where in a book to look, which set of man pages to use, etc

With google that mostly went to the wayside. I just needed to know something existed and I could pull together far more information faster than I was spending before to just do quick lookups

I didn’t say the job was about memorization back then. Rather I found that each of these new abstraction layers made it easier to go broad with one’s on hand knowledge instead of deep