An interesting article on text-book vrs real-world programming

On 01/01/2013 11:32 AM, Alexander Schreiber wrote: I once wrote a text editor as a throw-away code project in order to learn the operation of some of the more arcane instructions of a particular machine. It was full of odd vector instructions and satisfied me that I could understand the descriptions of the instructions detailed in the hardware manual. Shortly after that, I moved on to another venture. Imagine my surprise when I discovered fully 10 years later, that my little learning project was still being used as the standard editor! The instruction set of the architecture had changed, with many of the instructions that I had used being tossed on the scrap heap. Someone had very carefully replaced them with subroutines that did the equivalent thing. I was dumbfounded and horrified. Moral: If you write throw-away code, keep it to yourself and don't let another breathing human being see it. They might try to use it.