While almost everybody agrees that pure rote memorization is not usually the right approach in (any kind of) teaching, I tend also to be very skeptical of the oppositely pure approach.

We might reason that the programming languages we usually use today are not likely to be the ones used tomorrow, but the tremendous amount of understanding one can achieve using the languages of today can still be useful tomorrow.

Notation/code are purely conventions -- the idea they can express can be expressed in any number of ways. Nevertheless, ignoring notation/code can be harmful. Paraphrasing Leibniz, notation can be the difference since the necessary labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.