Maybe software engineers are just paranoid. Our best practice is to take hoarding to the extreme; keep every version of every file that ever existed, add a note about it, and push the entire history to each new checkout.
It probably does stem from some sort of loss aversion. We have all wished for longer undo history, things like git take that to the extreme. Now that we can't lose things, we're free to work without that fear.
There's a very particular pain you get when you know you had something and you lost it; or worse, you know you threw it away.
It may be related to too good of a memory, or autism, or whatever, but there are parts of my life where I have way too good a memory for everything I have and had, and other parts where I'm like "yeah I got a lot of something like that, but who cares".
> There's a very particular pain you get when you know you had something and you lost it; or worse, you know you threw it away.
CONSOLATION GROOK
Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain, of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again.
--Piet Hein https://www.phys.ufl.edu/~thorn/grooks.html
Is that not what version control is for? VCS is the ultimate hoarder! It keeps all your code back to the first commit ...
You can always go back in your version control history.
Re:Hoarding
by UncleOxidant on Monday May 22, 2023 @01:29PM
(#36034249)
Oh, definitely. But there's a part of me that continues to want to see that commented out code in the current code as a reminder or something. Yeah, it's not rational.
I think this is spot on. I definitely have hoarder tendencies. A look at my office would easily confirm this. I also tend to hoard code - I'll often comment out old code that no longer applies just in case it might be needed later, or in case I'll need to remember how I did something before. This gets pointed out in code reviews.