[Tiomaidh]

Both with essays and coding, there've been times when I was very grateful that there was a fixed moment in the document's life that I could easily go back to. Sometimes I start making changes and then think better of it[1]. Sometimes I edit something accidentally, and am very relieved that I'm asked whether I want to save my changes upon exiting the program. A possible solution is to have both normal saving and continuous autosaving to a backup file (as Word, Vim, etc. all do), but in practice that's a bit clunky.

[1] - Yes, I could hit the undo button repeatedly, since any editor worth its salt will have a virtually-unlimited undo. But it's reassuring to know that you've undo-ed to exactly the right point--in Vim, at least, the "+" indicating a modified file disappears once you've undone all your changes.

[andos]

Yeah, working with code is interesting because a source file is rarely in a “stable” state when it is being edited. The save button in this case serves as a checkpoint marker: “this here is good.” It's like doing mini-commits.

If we were to do away with the save button, the rest of the “working with files” story would have to be thoroughly rethought.