Know how you feel. Did a long reply just this morning to an article, and clicked the re-steem button INSTEAD of post FIRST. Reply window vanished. All my thoughts blown to smithereens...

But your post got me remembering how I first got started in programming. I was living in Santiago, Chile in the mid-'80s during the protests and demonstrations against their dictator at the time, General Agusto Pinochet. Anyway, I'd been laboriously typing out a program I wrote on a Timex Sinclair Basic. It was a spreadsheet program I recall, and I had to save all my work periodically on a tape recorder at 300 baud. So I'd been really into the code of this thing one night - spending hours & hours entering and testing it - and of course, in my enthusiasm, forgetting to SAVE the damn thing to tape. All of a sudden, at about 3:00am, a terrific blast goes off outside our house at the next corner. All the power goes out. My little computer crashes. All is lost in a heartbeat! Turns out, someone had planted a homemade bomb nearby and blew out the neighborhood bank. Lesson learned: ALWAYS BACKUP YER STUFF CAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THE SHIT's GONNA HIT THE FAN! :-)

Advice: Do it over. You've mulled it over in your head so much by now it'll probably come out better anyway and you'll be THANKFUL you did!