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Spaced repetition, Anki and Execute Program

2020-09-02

Here’s the tl;dr

QED.

Memorizing stuff is useful

It seems almost self-evident to me that this John Siracusa quote (via) is true:

It’s good to reach the level of competence where you can write [programs] from top to bottom and never have to look anything up.

There are two steps to reaching this enlightened state. The first is learning the facts in the first place. The second is remembering them. That second step is crucial because, by storing this stuff in your head, rather than offloading it to search engines and man pages, you make the connection between your brain and the computer higher bandwidth. Programming then becomes more more fun in the same way a conversation between two people who are fluent in the same language is often more fun.

Spaced repetition

Most of us stop making time for memorization when we stop taking exams. That’s probably because it’s insanely boring and time-consuming. But that is less true if you use spaced repetition, a family of algorithms for memorizing things efficiently.

Spaced repitition works like this: on day 0, you’re shown a question or prompt and asked to recall the response. You’re shown it again on day 1. And then again on (for example) day 3, day 8, day 20, etc. These growing intervals are chosen such that, just when you’re on the verge of forgetting something, you’re asked to dredge it up from the back of your mind. If you can’t do that then you go back to the beginning of the sequence of intervals for that prompt. The growing intervals mean that you’re using your time efficiently while minimizing (not eliminating!) the boringness.

It’s a simple and very natural idea so it’s a little surprising just how well it works. I used spaced repetition to learn German. I haven’t used German for nearly ten years. I have a terrible memory. I still remember not only the words, but the layout of specific flashcards I used to learn pretty obscure bits of vocabulary.

Anki

Natural language learning is probably the most common use case for spaced repetition, but lots of people use it to memorize bits of things they learn while programming. Anything that I have to look up more than a couple of times goes in my list of prompts and responses. Some examples from my “deck” of prompts and responses:

I only add things I have to look up. I don’t add things my editor helps me with, such as the calling signatures of functions. I might benefit from doing that, but that’s where I draw the line.

To manage my “deck” of prompts and responses, and to review them at appropriately spaced intervals I use Anki.

Anki is a charmingly crusty bit of open-source cross-platform software. It uses its own spaced repetition algorithm. It’s ugly. It’s confusing. The mobile versions are $25! But it’s extremely popular, very flexible, and better than the scummy rip-off.

You can and should assemble your own deck. But that’s a lot of work (more work than the remembering). So, if you want to give it a try first, download a small public deck from the shared library. I started with the US state capitals.

Execute Program and spaced repetition

Execute Program is a subscription learning site by Gary Bernhardt. You work your way through courses on Javascript, TypeScript, SQL and Regex and then you get pestered by a spaced repetition algorithm to review, i.e. regurgitate what you learned by completing tiny programs.

Each course takes perhaps 20 minutes/day for a couple of weeks (you have to wait for the reviews so you can’t do the whole course in a day). Once the lessons are over, the reviews take about ten minutes/day at first, but that approaches zero as the spaces between the repetitions grow.

Execute Program

The Execute Program review UI

The spaced repetition is a little crude relative to Anki. For example, I miss being able to say if something was easy or hard. After you get something right for the fourth time, on day 64, even it doesn’t feel like it’s stuck, you’re congratulated and told you’re never going to see it again. And related reviews all come on the same day, which makes them artificially easy.

But you can’t argue with results. I can say with a straight face that I “know” this stuff after spending four months as a subscriber, and doing the reviews. So, very highly recommended!

Execute Program’s courses

In what sense do you “know” these subjects after completing the Execute Program course? Firstly, you have the syntax at your fingertips thanks to spaced repetition. For example, I’m not an experienced TypeScript programmer. But I know the syntax well, and that makes occasionally writing crappy little TypeScript programs at work much less frustrating. Secondly, the courses themselves are incredibly well done. They’re not a parade of facts. I understand stuff I didn’t understand before I used the site.

I joined planning to learn concurrency but I ended up doing all of the other courses: regular expressions, JavaScript arrays, Modern JavaScript, TypeScript, and SQL.

They’re all really good! My only complaint (and the reason I’ve let my subscription lapse) is that they’re not longer and there aren’t more of them. The FAQ explains the teaching philosophy better than I can, so I won’t repeat it here. But I will make some comments on my two favorite courses.

Regular Expressions

This topic is the perfect fit for spaced repetition because there is no way around the fact that you just gotta learn a bunch of facts (the same goes for the course on JavaScript Arrays). The course stops before named groups and lookback/ahead, so I had to learn that stuff myself (from the second half of this perfect, short book). But if you want to learn 90% of what you need to read and write regular expressions in the absolute shortest amount of time, conditional on being able to remember any of it, this course is the way to go.

Concurrency

Concurrency is not the perfect fit for spaced repetition. It’s subtle. There are often many different solutions to a problem. And the review “answers” tend to be quite long in terms of number of characters. Nevertheless, this course is probably my favorite.

I have been banging my head against a brick wall with concurrency for years. It clicked for me this year in great part because of this course. (Shout out to this talk about the JS event loop and some Python async content too, especially Łukasz Langa’s videos and Brad Solomon’s Real Python article.)

Why is this course so good? Because it doesn’t start from the assumption that you know or care what callback hell is, or even that you’re a particularly experienced JavaScript programmer (I’m not). Assuming you know and hate JavaScript is a widespread antipattern in JavaScript writing: “you think this sucks” is the starting point. Well, I didn’t! But now you’re making me nervous (and confused because you’re teaching me about a bunch of stuff that I apparently should not do?!) In other words, as Max Kreminski says:

One of the worst things you can do is force people who don’t feel pain to take your aspirin.

The Execute Program Concurrency course just gets straight to the point: timeouts, promises. I hope they add async/await.

Conclusion

Execute Program is good. It’s fun. The lessons are extremely thoughtfully put together. I hope they add more!

And every time you have to search for something for the third time, add it to an Anki deck.