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I am not a student and I wonder often whether we fill in memorization for the idea of learning, as though it’s somehow more valuable to be able to write valid syntax from memory on a blank file than it is to know and practice the broader strokes of abstractions, operators, readability and core concepts which make up good software craftsmanship.

Sometimes I’m doing something in a new to me language, using an LLM to give me a head start on structure and to ask questions about conventions and syntax, and wondering to myself how much I’m missing had I started just by reading the first half of a book on the language. I think I probably would take a lot longer to do anything useful, but I’d probably also have a deeper understanding of what I know and don’t know. But then, I can just as easily discover those fundamental concepts to a language via the right prompt. So am I learning? Am I somehow fooling myself? How?



I'm not sure we really know how much of learning is memorization. As we memorize more stuff, we find patterns to compress it and memorize more efficiently.


Sounds awfully like machine learning, doesn't it?


That’s an interesting idea.

But the magic is in the “find patterns” stuff as memorization is just data storage. If you think of the machine learning algorithms as assigning items a point in a space, then it does uncover neighbors, sometimes ones we might not expect, and that’s interesting for sure.

But I’m not sure it’s analogous to what people do when they uncover patterns.

Definitely interesting to ponder though.


No, because ML is compression via interpolation and does not imply decompression.


That really depends on the particular algorithm.


You need both. If you don’t memorize the syntax how can you possibly expect to effectively express your ideas for the “broader strokes”?


I frequently manage to do this writing bash scripts.


Testing Regurgitation on concepts or process is a large part of what learning is too often the case.


You should only use the word learning (without scare quotes) if it’s something you believe is learning.

One of the first precepts of ML is that “memorization is not learning”.

Learning is generalization, application to new circumstances.

Schooling might not have learning as a product, but that’s a different problem.


I'm referring to students learning in school, relative to student perceptions of their learning experience in using early stage coding assistants.


Because not everyone can truly be great at their craft, but everyone can memorize syntax.

Schools compromise their curriculum so that every student has a chance in the interests of fairness.


You have to know the basics to build higher level knowledge and skills. What’s the use of high level book learning without the ability to operationalize it


Which school teaches programming as memorization? My school, KTH in Sweden, did not. I feel you may be trying to solve an already solved problem.




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