This is an interesting thought. I learned programming thru a text editor vim. I didn’t have autocomplete and LSPs wouldn’t be invented until 8 years later. I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to install/setup omnicomplete or snippets. All this meant I had to seek out the docs every time I wanted to use a method (or even be aware of an API), I had to write the same method every time.

I’d like to think this paid off for me, when writing JS I have a good heuristic on what methods do what that was slowly developed over constant repetition.

Now that I’m mentoring others I notice how others work with these modern editor features. It’s certainly faster than how I did it but I do wonder if there is a difference in aptitude.

When I worked at my first large corporation there was a very intelligent dev. I noticed over time he never really looked up answers on stack overflow or random blogs. He always went straight to the docs and the source code itself. I like to think his method of deliberate slowdown has paid off massively, even the way he asks questions was better than the rest of us.

It is hard to know which ways are better for learning and in the end we were all roughly making the same amount but there has to be something more to the usual pedagogy for software engineering.

I do wonder if tools like autocomplete, myriad of internet answers or musings, and now LLMs may be a hindrance for initial learning but it’s always hard to make these arguments because we have the benefit of learned experience whereas the new generation are now using different tools than us yet still arrive at the same conclusions.