What sticks in your head

This morning I read an article by Dennis Felsing about his impressive/intimidating Linux desktop setup. He uses a lot of tools that are not the easiest way to get things done immediately but are long-term productivity investments.

Remembrance of syntax past

Felsing apparently is able to remember the syntax of scores of tools and programming languages. I cannot. Part of the reason is practice. I cannot remember the syntax of any software I don't use regularly. It's tempting to say that's the end of the story: use it or lose it. Everybody has their set of things they use regularly and remember.

But I don't think that's all. I remember bits of math that I haven't used in 30 years. Math fits in my head and sticks. Presumably software syntax sticks in the heads of people who use a lot of software tools.

There is some software syntax I can remember, however, and that's software closely related to math. As I commented here, it was easy to come back to Mathematica and LaTeX after not using them for a few years.

Imprinting

Imprinting has something to do with this too: it's easier to remember what we learn when we're young. Felsing says he started using Linux in 2006, and his site says he graduated college in 2012, so presumably he was a high school or college student when he learned Linux.

When I was a student, my software world consisted primarily of Unix, Emacs, LaTeX, and Mathematica. These are all tools that I quit using for a few years, later came back to, and use today. I probably remember LaTeX and Mathematica syntax in part because I used it when I was a student. (I also think Mathematica in particular has an internal consistency that makes its syntax easier to remember.)

Picking your memory battles

I see the value in Felsing's choice of tools. For example, the xmonad window manager. I've tried it, and I could imagine that it would make you more productive if you mastered it. But I don't see myself mastering it.

I've learned a few tools with lots of arbitrary syntax, e.g. Emacs. But since I don't have a prodigious memory for such things, I have to limit the number of tools I try to keep loaded in memory. Other things I load as needed, such as a language a client wants me to use that I haven't used in a while.

Revisiting a piece of math doesn't feel to me like revisiting a programming language. Brushing up on something from differential equations, for example, feels like pulling a book off a mental shelf. Brushing up on C# feels like driving to a storage unit, bringing back an old couch, and struggling to cram it in the door.

Middle ground

There are things you use so often that you remember their syntax without trying. And there are things you may never use again, and it's not worth memorizing their syntax just in case. Some things in the middle, things you don't use often enough to naturally remember, but often enough that you'd like to deliberately remember them. Some of these are what I call bicycle skills, things that you can't learn just-in-time. For things in this middle ground, you might try something like Anki, a flashcard program with spaced repetition.

However, this middle ground should be very narrow, at least in my experience/opinion. For the most part, if you don't use something often enough to keep it loaded in memory, I'd say either let it go or practice using it regularly.

Related posts

• The hard part of becoming a command line wizard
• Negative space in operating systems
• Where the Unix philosophy breaks down