How long would it take you before you forgot your programming skills, one month, 6 months, a year etc... or i it so ingrained into you that it would just be a days refresher to get back up to speed.

I have a hard time seeing I would forget how to program, the bigger problem is that certain knowledge becomes outdated. Languages and APIs are moving rather fast.

For one reason or the other I had to stay away from C++ for about a year. It was nowhere as "forgotten" but I had some difficulty revving up to speed. So I suppose it's at least a couple of years, if you're into it.

I worked in a management position in 2003 and 2004, 2 years without a single line of code written, not even at home. I don't remember having any problem going back to coding at all.

You don't forget it. Its like forgetting how to speak a particular language or forgetting how to drive. You may get a little rusty but as soon as you start bashing away at the keyboard it all comes back.

Yeah, I agree with Buster2000. If you have the concepts down solid now, you should never really forget programming, because people don't forget how to reason. If anything, you might forget the syntax of a specific language. Can't say how long it would take to re-learn the syntax to a level where you know it by heart.

Or perhaps you can make a cheat sheet now for present or future users to pick up the language syntax sooner (this is what I did for LUA and Python).

I've been programming in c++, php and javascript for years. I'll never forget those. Objective-C on the other hand? It never got past my brain barrier :)

Around here, we often throw around that statement that managers lose their technical focus after 3 years. How true (or not) it is, I have no idea.

I've gone a month or more without programming before, and didn't have much problem. The bigger problem was having to re-familiarize myself with my own project, because I forgot the architecture of the project and what I was thinking and doing before taking the break, but I didn't forget how to program - I didn't forget the skill itself.

I find that I can easily forget general details or a general standard used in a language if I step away from it for more than a few months and use something else. The normal naming scheme used for a language if I find myself spending excessive time with something that goes against it, then I generally spend a few days to get through ramp up mode, and then a few weeks of a double checking mode still I'm comfortable with things again.

I keep post-it notes on my workstation's monitor to remind me of thing that are rather important but which I rarely actually use, such as pointer syntax in C. I doubt that I will ever forget how they function, but if I haven't read a line of C in six months then I like to double check my notes before assuming that a piece of code is actually doing what I first assume it is.

But for me it is a program's design and structure that is easiest to forget. Personally I like to write detailed plain English notes that walk me through a change I'm planning to make in code before I actually make it, especially if I think there is the slightest change that I won't have time to finish and get it fully tested before I have to walk away from the system, and then I make a short note of how far through my plan I've made it.

We all tell ourselves that we're smart and understand what is going on, but it really sucks when you come back to a bit of code months later when you thought you were just going to set it aside for a day or two... When I come across old projects I was involved with before I got into the habit of 'over documenting' things I get a very swift kick of a reminder of why I take all the extra time to include needless and brain dead obvious comments.