As a non-professional casual programmer I feel this. I can have moments in my life where I'm creating some incredible stuff for myself for work or things at home. Then there's periods of inactivity where I don't use the language. Go back later to add something, do something new, or fix a problem... and now I'm Googling again how the hell to do something that I used to know well. It's like speaking languages, you have to keep up with it or the neurons lose their connections. Usually some of it comes back once I start digging in, but I hate having to relearning stuff. Getting older with memory lapses doesn't help either.

[–] Aquila@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 hours ago

Reading and writing programming syntax uses the same areas of the brain that handle language. Knowing a programming language is very much a skill that erodes quickly when not used

[–] malware@lemmy.zip 10 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Same. Feel like I really gotta create a small library with examples of different stuff for each language I use.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 8 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I already have that. It's the old code, and I always find myself looking back to pull snippets because I don't remember how my genius in the past did it. But that's how you're supposed to do it anyway, right? Why reinvent the wheel.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 14 hours ago

Yeah, when I'm well in training with a language, there's certainly a magnitude more stuff that I know off the top of my head, but what really makes the difference is that I know where to look up how to do something and what libraries to pull in.

You don't need to remember everything to the point, where you could reproduce it without looking anything up. It's much more important to have a pattern in your head, so that when you do look things up, you can piece back together how it worked from that information you find online.