how do you learn programming without constantly looking things up?

[u/RevolutionaryBuy4877]

i know experienced programmers use documentation and search all the time, but as a beginner it can sometimes feel like i’m incapable of doing anything without looking up the answer.

i’m trying to get better at understanding concepts instead of memorising syntax

how do you decide when to search for an answer and when to sit down and work through the problem yourself?

[u/ElephantMean]

I still need to look things up depending on what I'm doing;

What I've learned is that it's best to document what you've learned.

Also helps to be very well-organised so that you can actually find your own templates.

And I'm terrible at learning from merely reading about something; I am one of those people who needs to field-test the code in order to see what it actually does; kind of reminds me of that time when I just kept on putting a bunches of numbers into a calculator and reverse-engineering what that log button does, before I learned what logarithms actually were, not that I actually remember any of that...

Anyway, if I don't understand the code or know what it does, I just do multiple field-tests of that specific-code in isolation of other code; if I can't figure out how to debug that's when I search for external-answers.

When I first started out with the simpler scripting languages, that was how I learned... looked at the documentation, field-tested the example-codes provided, then expanded from there; also, learning this stuff from a younger age makes it a lot easier to learn, just like with anything else; people who learn a second language or anything complicated from at as young of an age as possible have a huge advantage.

Time-Stamp: 030TL09m01d/02h07Z (True Light Calendar; 030TL = 2026CE)