I usually save my bookmarks on the Wayback Machine just so there's at least one copy out there.

Stackoverflow itself retains all deleted questions and answers. If you have enough points you can see them.

How many points? Right now I have 16.7k.

Less than that for sure. Maybe you need to enable some setting, like on HN?

Which ones were they?

One of my favorite answers was about programming languages written by a Jörg W Mittag. It was a comparison between shells like bash and proper programming languages and featured a huge table comparing syntax, showing how languages are supposed to scale up in complexity while shells are supposed to scale down.

Never found it again on the site. Years ago I remember digging up a link to the question but got the 404 page when I followed it.

I think I found the answer you mean! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3637668/why-are-scriptin... — the topic matches, there's a table comparing syntax (though I wouldn't call it huge), and it includes the idea of scaling up to large programs vs scaling down to 10 character programs.

(The question was deleted in July 2014 and undeleted in December 2020: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/3637668/revisions , so right now anyone can see it. BTW with ≥10000 reputation one can see deleted posts, per https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges and https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools — e.g., as you mentioned you have ~16k points, try the much-mirrored "programmer joke" deleted question (linked from e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76584).)

Yeah, that's the one. It must have been years since I tried looking for it. I didn't know it had been restored... Thanks for looking it up! I can see the programmer jokes question as well.

Aw. I really enjoy his answers in general.

I wonder if the answer survives in an old data dump or in the Archive?