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I'm just curious as to whether when most of you program, whether or not you do that. I use them when I feel I must. I want to see where I stand compared to other programmers. Thank you.

I only use them for stuff that I havn't learned yet. Otherwise I just program from my memory.

This is an illogical question, of course people use reference material, they didn't just magically learn everything overnight, and then naturally if you do something often enough then you'll remember it without having to look it up.

I'm always striving to do things I haven't done before, so there's no way I could operate without reference materials. Dead trees to help me remember or learn the theory, unix man pages and src code for C func prototypes, internet references, ... I also read a lot of (research and journal) papers both new and old to try to grow my understanding, and I try to learn new programming languages fairly often. 22 yrs at this and I'm still boggled how much there is to learn, spent the last couple days reading slews of papers from the 50's and 60's, and feeling highly enlightened. I think that if you try to operate without being open to new ideas, new approaches, new reference materials, you condemn yourself to mediocrity.

I wonder why some people seem to think it's making them better programmers if they don't use any reference material whatsoever. I use reference materials for everything I'm not totally sure in.

One of the most used directories on my hard drive is the local copy of the Dinkumware standard library reference. True to the programmer commandment: if in doubt, look it up. On my bookshelf is a Harper-Collins English-German dictionary, the Intel IA32 references, manuals for GCC, binutils and make in hardcopy, the "camel book" (Perl) and a Stroustrup Special Edition (C++).

Not using reference material is like driving with a blindfold. Your buddies might think it's cool, until you get them and yourself into serious trouble.

And seeing the objections with the vote as it was (giving only "yes, sometimes" and "no, all out of my head" as options wasn't really fair), I adapted it somewhat, and reset the vote count. (Up until then, 4-0 votes for "yes, sometimes".)