[daanvd]

> a three-ring binder called the Prompt File, stuffed with printouts of the dozens of tables in the system, and religiously updated anytime anyone changed anything of significance.

Hey, at least they had documentation.

[praptak]

I learned to program on programmable calculators. I don't think I have ever reached the ratio of documentation to code that I've had back then.

Necessity is the mother of documentation.

[taneq]

Pretty hard to write self documenting code when all you have are single letter variables and the language doesn’t support comments.

[choeger]

And a backup.

[redis_mlc]

Well, as a DBA, I periodically use a 3rd party tool to print out the schema. It's mainly for new hires to learn from.

But sometimes I'll flip through it and notice:

- mis-spelled table names, usually duplicate tables

- missing FKs

- missing unique keys, most commonly for early RoR apps

- developer-specific EAV tables with 1 row.

The benefit always outweighs the dead trees, but printing once a year is typical. Back in the day, more frequenctly on 25-line terminals where there was too much scrolling.

[praptak]

I don't get why this post got into [dead]. Anybody care to explain their reasoning?