Chesterton's fence is a good reason to lament rather than forgive the ugliness in a large existing code-base. That's because it makes it hard to distinguish wh

Chesterton's fence is a good reason to lament rather than forgive the ugliness in a large existing code-base. That's because it makes it hard to distinguish what is genuinely necessary from the genuinely bad ideas. My experience with huge real-world code bases is that yes they do encode lots of important functinal knowledge about real-world requirements that a new programmer will not see. But it will also contain even more plain old stupidity.