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Chestertons Fence, to put a name to the phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chest

• thewebcount 7y ago
  How so? In GP's case, they found that the "fence" really was no longer needed: > Someone cleaned up the lower level library in 2016 or so, but the rounding remained in the upper layer. This is like the opposite of a Chesterton fence, where the reason it was put up no longer exists, so it's totally safe to remove it.
  • 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
    The point of Chesterton's fence isn't that the fence is necessarily still useful, it's that being ignorant of the usefulness of a thing isn't equivalent to knowing that it's useless.
  • jdminhbg 7y ago
    > Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. This is the bit that applies.
  • reificator 7y ago
    Chesterton's fence is not about never changing things. They followed Chesterton's fence to the letter. They saw something that didn't make sense, and then tracked down why it worked the way it did. Once they understood the root cause, they examined the environment and discovered that the underlying issue had been fixed. That allowed them to confidently rework the inconvenient behavior into something better.