Comment by amelius
1 day ago
> Who would let a junior dev trim bits, or boldly modify a decades old codebase?
"Chesterton's Fence": you shouldn't tear down a fence (or a piece of code) until you understand exactly why it was put there in the first place.
Chesterton’s Fence is a thing because a fence is something that was definitely placed with intent. It’s possible the intent is no longer applicable or was just plain stupid, but it didn’t happen by chance, so you need to make sure the original reason no longer applies.
Nothing in the human body was placed with intent. It’s still important to understand what it does before you go messing with it, but it’s a very different sort of thing.
Can you explain the fundamental difference between our intent and the intent of, say, a molecule in our chain of evolution? Is it free will? Because that debate hasn't been sorted out yet.
The difference is intelligence, which might be a better word than “intent.” A fence was built by someone with some measure of intelligence. An evolved feature is randomness combined with selection pressures, and sometimes it’s only there because it’s not sufficiently detrimental to be selected out.
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