Tue, 27 Nov 2007
Never throw away information
That was the first bit of advice Joe Grohens gave me when I started working at Wolfram Research in 1996, and it's still the best programming maxim I know. I just rediscovered its value.
Five years ago Dave and I were editing some documentation source files when we found some old TeX macros that weren't used anymore. He left them in the code and defined them as no-ops, while I was leaning towards getting rid of them all. And there those macros sat doing nothing for half a decade til tonight when I suddenly needed the information they preserved.
Never throw away information.
posted by Bill White at 20:07 | permalink | email me | | |
