This is an amusing story, but I disagree with not using numeric literals. Most of the time, sure, you don't want to use numeric literals, but, sometimes, you d

This is an amusing story, but I disagree with not using numeric literals. Most of the time, sure, you don't want to use numeric literals, but, sometimes, you do. I posted my example in another comment here. As for the other conclusion, I have a story of my own. I once shut down all of my company's asynchronous task processing for about 20 minutes, completely by mistake. Our web servers kept serving, and nobody external would have noticed a difference, but, for 20 minutes, our scrapers stopped scraping, our NLP classifiers stopped classifying, and a bunch of stuff that made us money wasn't happening. Had I not noticed it and fixed it ASAP, we probably would have lost money. Instead, I immediately announced what I had done, got help, and we fixed it. The real moral of the story is that an honest mistake is nothing to be ashamed of. I make mistakes all the time. Some of them make it into production. Big deal. Everybody does.