Chesteron’s Fence: Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building /faust, more here: /july, web: july.rocks

creator of le /bleu @elefant. 
co-creator of /farcards

destroyer of things.

The first thing a new hire does often is wants to do is rewrite a whole thing. It’s because they don’t know what the fence supports yet

this is a great analogy for coding, many such cases on codebases where code seems to do nothing but might be there for a reason

🧠BrainTrust

Moravec's paradox: "We're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly"

You have to know and respect the existing rules so you can selectively break them in good intelligence

Yes, it's an excellent example why modern "conservatives" are nothing of the sort

I like this,

If you can understand it's use, you can understand its need for continual use or to discontinue in some cases.

chesterton’s token: do not create a token until you know why you need a token in the first place