[dermotbrennan]

The problem is that languages and especially libraries change too frequently. A doctor can learn the name of every bone in the body and that knowledge will for the rest of his life. In programming, there are very few things that will still be the same in 20+ years and we have no idea what those things are. It depends on the field but things can change so much within 2 or 3 years that its just not worth memorizing everything.

[gwern]

The timespan of change doesn't matter; the question, as always, is whether the benefits outweigh the cost.

Now, the cost is approximately <5 minutes per flashcard to give you roughly 95% recall (more details: http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#what-to-add ); so the question is, does not knowing something you could've put into a flashcard - the consequences of not knowing it, the time it takes to look it up, whether you will even know to look it up, etc - outweighs the cost of a few minutes' review over that time period.

I think for a lot of stuff this can be true: shell scripting is not going away in 20 years, for example. If you're programming in it routinely, a language you will use for only 10 years can be worth memorizing for a while. If you're using a tool every day for the next year, there's going to be a lot worth memorizing there too.

[lostnet]

  > In programming, there are very few things that will still  
  > be the same in 20+ years and we have no idea what those  
  > things are.  

For the most part we are walking toward local optima in programming languages with larger jumps rarely succeeding.

SRS is well designed for gradually changing bodies of knowledge. New cards are added and come up more often, older cards can be retired but they rarely come up anyway.