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Comment on Memorizing a programing language using spaced repetition software parent

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These were my thoughts too - while I agree with the general sentiment of using Spaced Repetition; it also depends on the language you are using. If I find I'm beginning to recognize an abstraction I immediately begin to search for something someone else has already done.

The author of the post used PHP as an example and I think it's a terrible example because PHP's standard library and 3rd party libraries were all over the place in terms of naming conventions, structure, duplicated but not quite abstractions, &c...

I've found learning languages like Haskell to be very different - where learning the axioms and postulates is what leads me to implementation specifics. A good example: I was building accumulating recursive functions for a little project and was looking at the code and said this to myself, "This doesn't feel right, this looks like Scheme or Erlang code - not Haskell."

I set out to find any abstractions built into Haskell or 3rd party libraries that handled accumulators - low and behold folds! I've done that numerous times with this language proceeding from fundamentals and the process of abstraction to find first if the abstraction has already been done!

[EDIT]

I use Spaced Repetition for learning Haskell - but it isn't names of functions; it is the Monad laws, or Functor laws, &c... that I want to memorize.

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