Those that are diligent with their references, know where to find good reference material and use references effectively are a lot more effective than those that try to utilize deduction and memory alone. This applies to programmers, artists, musicians and just about any creative field you can think of.
Programmers should be good with utilising 3rd party utilities and have a set of libraries that solve a large set of complicated problems. Not just work on their bazooka programming skills so that they can hammer all their problems away at the keyboard, but know how to use 3rd party solutions that could solve a large part of your problem. This is increasingly becoming the dominant part of programming. Where the most effective programmers are not the ones that can whip out the low level “C” implementation within the hour, but rather the one that can forgo their ego and actually think about the big picture of maintenance, testing and stability.
Your brain forgets subtle details very easily, and a lot of those details are not visible to the one creating the solution. So it is imperative that you have good reference material on hand, and some sort of a review or testing system to iron out the faults.
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