"looking things up"
To expand on this point, it's not the time it takes to look things up. It's the loops of trying and failing.
I've recently switched from C# to Ruby. In C# I'd consider myself as close to an expert as an ordinary man can get. I never had to look anything up, but more importantly... it was rare that I was confused why something didn't work. In fact most of the time when I saw something not work I knew exactly what I forgot.
In ruby, where i'm less familiar. I'm surprised every now and then. It's not the "go to the internet and search" part that looses time. It's the "let's try this, and see if it works". I might spend an hour on writing 3 lines of code. In C#, I might forget the 3 lines, but I know roughly what they are... and if i had to look it up I can confirm if it's the right 3 lines in minutes.
It's both - think of having to look something up on the Internet as an L1 cache miss, while having to look something up and then try multiple variations as an L2 cache miss (having the API in muscle memory so you don't have to think about it is a register hit). It may take you 3 seconds to write out an API call from memory, 3 minutes to search for it on the Internet, and 3 hours to diagnose a problem through trial and error. Occasionally even as much as 3 weeks - I've had bugs that lasted that long when it was a bug in the underlying framework, because you never expect that the bug will be in someone else's code.
Obviously avoiding the 3-week bugs will save you more time than the 3-minute lookups, but you can continue to improve significantly by turning many of those 3-minute lookups into 3-second typing bursts.
I am not a programmer but I am able to do some "things". Starting with Unix in the 80's (and trying to do C) back when you had a book or two (and nobody to ask any questions). There were many times that I had to work 4 hours or longer just to figure out and iterate (to see what would actually work syntax wise) what I could easily search for today. One book or two, nobody to ask, total trial and error. I always tried to buy as many books as I could (which I typically had to find at a college bookstore an hour away) so I could at least triangulate an answer by a different discussion of the same point from different authors.
Also had those plastic syntax cheat sheets which I picked up.
same here - it's been tough breaking the 'buy a new book' habit. If there's something I find that I want to save, I will either save the complete page, or just copy/paste the relevant text.
I've recently switched from C# to Ruby. In C# I'd consider myself as close to an expert as an ordinary man can get. I never had to look anything up, but more importantly... it was rare that I was confused why something didn't work. In fact most of the time when I saw something not work I knew exactly what I forgot.
In ruby, where i'm less familiar. I'm surprised every now and then. It's not the "go to the internet and search" part that looses time. It's the "let's try this, and see if it works". I might spend an hour on writing 3 lines of code. In C#, I might forget the 3 lines, but I know roughly what they are... and if i had to look it up I can confirm if it's the right 3 lines in minutes.