At one of my very first programming jobs (during the first dot com boom) an older developer took me aside and said “I’m going to tell you the single biggest pro

At one of my very first programming jobs (during the first dot com boom) an older developer took me aside and said “I’m going to tell you the single biggest productivity enhancer I learned in my entire career, ‘always number your punch cards’”. I think he meant it just as a joke but it’s actually stuck with me as pretty valuable. At one point in his career being a programmer was as much about manipulating paper cards as it was systems thinking. At some point in the future manipulating text may not be a central job of a programmer, but I doubt systems thinking gets replaced anytime soon by currently understood technologies. I remember people claiming intellisense style code completion would be the end of developers, but I’m sure there are more developers now than when it was introduced.