Collective memory (was: Good code patterns in Python)

[Jeff Hinrichs]

"Charles Shannon Hendrix" <shannon at news.widomaker.com> wrote in message
news:hff5eb.e9h.ln at escape.shannon.net...
> In article <vg88va53uha8e at corp.supernews.com>, Cameron Laird wrote:
>
[..snip...]
> One really funny problem was when I guy reformatted his Python code,
> around 15K lines of it, and basically unindented *ALL* of the code to
> column 1.  It was the only recoverable copy of the code too.
>
> He had to read the entire program line by line to recreate the logic.
What happens if you replace brackets { with '' in C/C++.  What you are
talking about is being bitten by a lack of version control not a problem
with the language, imho. What if this same programmer removed all asterisks
from some c source?  As mentioned in an earlier post, tabnanny.  I knew a
guy, who in his first couple of weeks as a programmer, was cleaning up some
testing folders and managed to rm * the development source.  After soiling
myself and taking a deep breath, I restored the files from backup. <g>  Two
lessons to be learned: 1) It wasn't rm's fault nor the fault of my source
code, it was my own brain-dead action. 2) That which does not kill us, makes
us stronger.

-jeff