For instance, knowing that Corn doesn't supply absorbable niacin without nixtamalizaion, and diets dependent on corn tend to have large bouts of pellagra, is something that took hundreds of years to work out.
Walking into a corn fed post-apocalyptic future knowing that soaking your corn in ash water and hulling it prevents pellagra and improves the viability of your group is some handy knowledge.
This is also why rebuilding a web page after deleting it is so much faster the second time around. You've solved problems on the first go round that weren't apparent when you started.
> This is also why rebuilding a web page after deleting it is so much faster the second time around.
Counter-intuitively though, while a lot of people think rebuilding software from scratch will be a lot faster, in practice it's not because people tend to have to re-invent and re-discover a lot of things, and bolt a lot of other stuff on top as well. Plus over-engineering, plus analysis paralysis, etc.
So making a carbon copy of e.g. a website: sure, but for a lot of software it doesn't work like that.
That said, I do believe rebuilding software will work out better in the long run because learning from the mistakes of the past. It'll be interesting to see what e.g. Google's Fuchsia will turn out to be, the first big / sponsored OS made from scratch in a while.
And Firefox / Rust is another interesting one; it was a massive investment and risk, but I think it's paying off.
I have the same experience in general programming. You start doing something but then you run into a dead end. Then you look for other routes to your destination and find them. If you do it the second time you can avoid those dead-ends, which you didn't even know about when you started.
I think this means we should keep log-books like ship-captains do so we can avoid treacherous waters on subsequent trips.
Walking into a corn fed post-apocalyptic future knowing that soaking your corn in ash water and hulling it prevents pellagra and improves the viability of your group is some handy knowledge.
This is also why rebuilding a web page after deleting it is so much faster the second time around. You've solved problems on the first go round that weren't apparent when you started.