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Pavel Gurkov
Pavel Gurkov

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Question: How many of you google basic things for your language after several years of experience?

What I mean is, say you're a Javascript, or Python, or C programmer. How many of you google how to write a for loop in your language regularly, despite having used it for several years? Or a while loop, or a subscription operator, or something basic like that.

The reason I'm asking is just to understand the general trend.

Top comments (6)

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I'm (mostly) a PHP developer these days. I've been doing it on-and-off since PHP 3.
I have to look up the order of arguments to common functions all the time because PHP was written by a bunch of people who couldn't agree on anything.

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Vincent Milum Jr

Technically, they did agree on one particular thing: consistency with the underlaying C libraries PHP functions were calling. But these C libraries were never built with each other in mind. PHP was initially "scripted C", and so everything uses those function parameter order. Programming in C and jumping to PHP is natural if you're used to the underlaying libraries, but when taken as a collection, the inconsistency does shine.

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trueneu profile image
Pavel Gurkov

Thanks for sharing. Bad language design == no mnemonics == look ups, gotcha. :)

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Eric Donovan

All the time (android dev >10 years of android, other stuff before that). I remember architectural patterns, structures, things about how android works behind under the hood, but I don't bother remembering android's APIs. If my IDE's auto complete doesn't give me the answer, I'll use google / stackoverflow. I also check open source code that I already put on github whenever I know I already solved the problem before but can't remember the syntax.

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Peter

My homepage is the MDN docs.

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Pavel Gurkov

That can mean a lot of things. :)