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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I drank a lot of sugary soda as a kid (real sugar, not HFCS) and ate lots of candy. I still managed a long career as a programmer until last year.

I wonder if there is more to this study than simply sugar consumption; perhaps its in combination with other dietary factors, or even HFCS instead of plain sugar, or a different type of microbiome from back then compared to more recent times (different diet in general compared to 5o years ago).

I also wonder if any developmental effect measured when a child is still young is eventually overcome over time.

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The study is around memory function development. You really don't need good memory to be a programmer. I have googled code questions and came across my own answers on SO. It happened more than once.

> You really don't need good memory to be a programmer.

That’s not memory, that’s hard disk (or I guess SSD for you youngins’). You definitely need good memory to be a good programmer because large problems require a larger working set to efficiently reference whilst problem solving.

While many problems in computer science that can theoretically be solved with a small amount of memory and a large amount of slower disk, many of them cannot be solved in what we’d consider a reasonable amount of time.

You're being disingenuous, when people(including the comment you're replying to) say "memory" when they're talking about people they obviously don't mean the same thing as when you're talking about a computer. He's clearly referring to his longterm recall which is directly analogous to "hard disk" as you put it.

I was referring to human memory as well.

OP obviously is talking about the human memory and for sure we don't have a hard disk, if at all, we have volatile memory. Power it off for long enough and all is gone.

GP appears to have been programming for quite some time and thier career predated Google. I remember programming before SO and Google- you had to be able to recall a lot more things from memory to get something working, although not having to worry as much about security, networking, etc… often made things easier.

...or, maybe, you would have been the next Einstein if only you hadn't eaten all that sugar!

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