Syntax Matters

But memorizing all of the possible syntaxes (syntaxi?) doesn't. In my career I've spent months/years with _at least_ Ada, Assembly (x86), Bash, Basic, Csh, C/C++, C#, Fortran (4/77), Golang, HTML, Java, Javascript, Pascal, Perl, Python, Scala, SQL, and VisualBasic (v6 and VBA). Then there's "config" file formats, css, ini, json, xml, and, yaml. What about .bzl, .csv, .proto, and .thrift? What about your favorite DSL? Are they config files? Languages? Who knows? Who cares? 

Can I sit down in front of a compiler and pound out syntactically correct code in all those languages today? Not even close. I could manage "Hello World" in most of them, with a little help from the compiler/interpreter, but others (ada) I don't even remember where to begin other than there's a header that defines everything, and a separate implementation.

And that's OK. The important thing is to be able to read what's there, understand what the impact is, and understand the structures and data flow well enough to make the change you want without having unintended impact on something else. And in any sufficiently large system the syntax can't tell you that. It can hint, it can guide, but it can't tell you what the class/package/method/library in the next file is actually doing.

Plus, there are lots of good resources available online to help with the syntax part. Between them and your IDE memorizing where to put a ;, the order of method parameters, or whether it's int foo; or var foo int isn't the best use of your time.

So focus on the important things. Understanding the code in front of you. Writing code that the next person can understand. Thinking about WHY you're doing the thing you're doing and if there is a better, more systemic solution. And look up the syntax when you need it.