81–90 of 94 posts
I'm working on an coder app that uses SRS. More like 'Twitter for code, with SRS'. I want to 'follow' people who produce good cards, and get their feedback on the cards I make. This would make it superior to just having a snippets.txt file that I eventually import into Anki. Killer search, with tags, would make it better than github gist (although this will be integrated)... Oh, and the scheduler is taylor made for c…
I've been doing this for almost a year and I agree it accelerates programming languages/libraries learning. Not having to switch between my text editor and the language/library reference lets me focus on the hard problems. As a programming languages geek, a few months ago a realized that every time I came back to a language that I had learned earlier, I'd forgotten a good chunk of it, rendering all my efforts in vain…
If you just look up function when you need them, you'll memorize the most important ones you use over time, no special practice needed.
So I really can't see how this isn't the worst form of "premature optimization". I guess it's fun if you've got nothing better to do, but I'd never recommend it.
(But I'm not saying you shouldn't read through a language and its libraries so you know what's there conceptually. That's a good thing to do, so you know what to look up later.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. In my proposal on the topic, I proposed dividing a freshman CS class into two groups. One group would use spaced repetition, the second wouldn't. To compare the groups, I proposed using a few common metrics (SLOC, cyclomatic complexity, Halstead's metrics) to get a gauge of the different size of solutions. My guess was that a more "fluent" student would write shorter and simpler programs simply by not needing…
But (in reference to the parent topic of learning libraries vs. learning language primitives) shouldn't freshman CS students be mostly NOT using library functions? For example the classic exercises in sorting, learning various sorting algorithms, or manipulation of tree structures, matrices, etc. if you're just using library functions you aren't really learning what's going on. Not really commenting on spaced repetit…
At my university the freshman course was, for two years, taught in Haskell. To my eternal shame I managed to dodge most of the first year with a fistful of RPLs, so I never got to sample it.
The result was that lots of students dropped out of computer science and went elsewhere. More than had when being taught something else.
So they switched back to a intro course based on Java (which is their main teaching language for the first two years, C is the second language which is picked up in the 2nd half of the first year). Then you go on to bog-standard Data Structures & Algos / Computational Structures courses, Algo course etc etc which is where you learn the ins and outs of sorting, trees and so forth. Or, in my case, you barely do so because you are a lazy student who didn't do his homework.
The upshot is that you wind up spending most of the intro course teaching the mechanics of Java and motivating students with "interesting" examples. Various graphical geegaws, basically. In such cases students usually aren't using the standard lib, they're using a provided library.
I have been programming for the last 15 years and I still sometimes look things up, even in languages I use daily. I would not really change this, since if I use it often I will remember it - - and if not, it's just one search away. I think memorizing random facts is a really bad way to become a better programmer - - much better ways is to solve problems and read expert code (via ex. GitHub). Regarding the memorizati…
Here's a really good article on the staged memory technique, and the guy who first popularized it: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia... It sounds very effective but only if you make time for it every day. Combining this with the "Moonwalking" techniques might be best of all.
Thanks for posting this. I hope this format is useful to you guys. I actually spent the last two days making a video of this, with screen recordings of using Anki and such, and then felt it's a lot more efficient to just get the info on a static HTML page instead. Any advice appreciated. - Derek
In our extensive user testing we have seen our users make great gains by using SRS. In blind Ruby coding tests we have seen users complete them faster with more confidence in their abilities and results they generate. Got some great data and numbers on exactly how much advantage learning this way gives you. Plan to release it when we launch in a couple of weeks. We are http://www.codesonic.com/ by the way.
Looks great, I hope you do well.
Oddly enough, I've tried SR multiple times in the past, with very bad outcomes. For example, if I added 10 new english words on day 1 (english is my second language), I would only recall ~10-20% the day after. Then a few days ago I started reading The Memory Book which really emphasizes on visualizing things, making correlations, etc. The effort of visualizing and using imagination really made a difference: in one ho…
It's a well respected way of storing information. But (drawing a terrible analogy) it's a linked list, not a hash.
It's hard to perform a random lookup on something 2/3rds of the way through your mental tour.
SRS works on the well understood phenomena of repeated exposure and tested recall. They're very good at imprinting atomic information even if that information has no context whatsoever. The original research was done with randomly chosen letters.
https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B_WU5GXujPOVSl9WajFaaWlCTG...
It's one of the coolest things I've seen in years!!!
Having read the entire book was incredibly helpful. Anytime I thought of a feature I wanted to add, or wanted to rearrange the site in a certain way, I knew how to do it-or at least, I knew that there was some pattern that would easily solve exactly what I wanted to do. I made sites for myself, for my school, for my friends-and they were decent. Not fabulous, but my sites were a lot easier to update and maintain than the site my school's $250/hour consultant had built (tables were visibly different on each content page!)
I used the same approach when I finally started writing code professionally 10 years later. In one case I solved a problem in 17 minutes that my coworkers had spent months trying to solve, because I knew that there was an existing function that did exactly what they were looking for. These things were surprisingly hard to find in Google, but having near-encyclopedic knowledge of the language's features made it a lot easier. Instead of searching for a general problem in an obscure language, I knew the exact function name I was searching for and only had to look up syntax.
Memorization is incredibly useful, even in a problem-solving discipline like programming. And having an encyclopedic knowledge of your language is extremely rewarding when you remember a simple way to solve a complex problem :)