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Comment by larntz | Hacker News Reader

Is this an age thing? I do the exact same thing. Every time I stop typing I hit ctrl-s between 2-5 times. I don't eve think about it anymore.

My kids are getting to the age where they are doing projects on a computer and I'm constantly telling them to "save early, save often."

I guess it's some form of PTSD from computing in the 90's.

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I worked at the help desk when I was in college back in the 90s and our mantra to users (and ourselves) was “save often and make backups”. We figured the more people we could inculcate that practice into, the fewer “I’ve been writing all afternoon and the computer just crashed, I can get my work back, right?” and “My only copy of my thesis was on this floppy and now I’m getting a disk read error, you can fix it, right?” visits we’d get that would end in tears.

A few months ago, I saw a popular meme on Reddit (ProgrammingHumor, or something like that) where the core of the joke was: "that face when Visual Studio crashes after you've been writing code for 2 hours and forgot to save."

And my reaction was: how do you forget to save? That's muscle memory for me, man! Command-S gets hit five times in as many minutes.

IntelliJ doesn't have "saving", it writes all files to its cache constantly and then to the original files as soon as you alt+tab, and yet I still find myself hitting Ctrl+S constantly, usually as part of like a nervous tic or something, where while I'm thinking I'll save, paste my clipboard, undo, repeat.

How do you code for 2 hours without saving, considering you wouldn't be able to run/test/compile without saving?

I’ve coded for hours early on in a project without compiling/running/testing. But I’m old enough and wise enough to constantly save.

> save early, save often.

I got the same advice from my grandfather, who grew up in the Great Depression. I think it was PTSD on his part, too.

It's not an age thing I don't think. I'm 22 and after I finish any tiny section of code I format it and then save. I don't know why, it's just habit now

Yeah, but do you save several times before you're finished that tiny section?

Several times? No, just saving once is sufficient.

Why not twice to be sure?

Because most programs don't do anything if no changes were made between the current state and the last save. VS Code shows which files have changes made since the last save, for example.

Exactly why it doesn't hurt to save a bunch of times to be sure.

My dad was doing support & sysadmin and it was save and make copies, both on-line (it was 5 years before we would start using cloud) and on physical media.

It feels like a programmer thing, since unsaved files won't be compiled when you run the program. At least that's where I got the habit from

Programmers have an additional issue with incremental build systems that do not always rebuild everything they should.

It definitely is! My company recently connected Office to OneDrive, which means everything saves automatically. I still find myself saving after every paragraph.

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