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techwizrdtoday at 10:33 AM3 repliesview on HN

This seems adjacent to Chesterton's Fence, though maybe not the canonical form of it.

For anyone not familiar with the term, Chesterton's Fence is the idea that you should understand why a rule exists before trying to remove it or work around it: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

Here the issue is not that the rule was removed, but that the code followed the wording while missing the reason the rule existed.


Replies

falloustoday at 2:58 PM

Agreed that on first blush it looks like Chesterton's Fence but it may be more of a cargo culting situation.

keyboredtoday at 12:20 PM

[flagged]

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zellyntoday at 1:28 PM

Came here to say this. How can you write an entire article about Chesterton’s Fence without mentioning Chesterton’s Fence?!

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