Memorizing facts is always a waste of time.

The biophysics professor that I worked for in college had that attitude. He studied protein structure, but rather than wasting his time memorizing the structures of amino acids, he just worked with them, and eventually the knowledge of their structures became second nature. In biochemistry, the professors tried to make everyone memorize all of those structures... but even the professors didn't get them all correct.

Those same professors couldn't explain basic things like ionization, or make sense of the fact that .1 cm = 1mm.

Not for long. Mobile Google has turned Trivial Pursuit into a typing competition.

I'd also question the use of the phrase modern culture here. In nonliterate cultures memorizing facts didn't just pass for smart, it was smart: An unmemorized fact was an unrecorded fact. In pre-Gutenberg literary culture paper, ink, and literacy itself were still sufficiently rare and expensive -- and entire books so much more expensive -- that it was still an important skill to be able to memorize lots of things.

(Those were the days when books were so costly that universities owned one copy of each book, and "education" consisted largely of copying out books that were read out to you by the lecturer. If you didn't copy down every word of Galen correctly as it was read out, you might be doomed to cite Galen wrong for the rest of your life, because it's not as if you were likely to be able to afford a copy written out by someone else.)

Now that paper is mass-produced by the ream, mass literacy exists, and even visual and auditory memory is heavily augmented by portable digicams and audio recording tech, we can afford to memorize less than ever before in history.

I hope you're right.

"I'd also question the use of the phrase modern culture here."

You make a good point.

It reminds me of the Aborgine's navigation technique referred to as "Songlines" or "Dreaming Tracks" -- they didn't have maps and instruments to navigate with, so instead they told stories. With those stories, they could convey not only a route, but also the locations of water holes and foraging grounds, and by using the story as a mnemonic, it was easy to learn and remember as well as to pass on to another.

Not true. Knowing the APIs you most commonly use instead of having to keep flicking back to the reference makes you much more efficient.

Your professor DID memorize them, he was just smart about how he did it. Instead of memorizing upfront, he did it in bitesize pieces, and was productive along the way. That's what a good programmer does too.

Chess champions use this technique too. I remember seeing a TV documentary where they got a chess champion to look at a board layout for a few seconds and reproduce it in front of them. They could do this easily for a valid board layout. But when they got people with no knowledge of chess to design the board layout in an invalid manner the chess champion could not reconstruct the board as accurately or as quickly.

I guess a common programming equivalent would be a design pattern.

That said, we're saying the same thing -- rote memorization without applied knowledge isn't worth anything. Learning by doing is the way to go.

Alternatively, one could say that knowing your tools is quite important. I mean, I'd consider someone who learns, forgets, and relearns what a screwdriver does not to be the definition of 'bright'.

Or it might be that functional programming was reaching a level of abstraction that didn't make it especially useful for the problem at hand.

One could argue that bringing in a functional language first thing is somewhat akin to "big, upfront design" in the sense that it assumes a level of abstraction before you have complete knowledge of the domain.

The thing is that neither is bad, you do need some abstraction to start with. But both can be taken too far.