[salawat]

A quirk of information propagation. If it's there, it was put there for a reason. If you don't understand the reason, you're at risk of having to rediscover it the hard way; something we generally wish to avoid at all costs.

Which is somewhat ironic considering the attitude around things like Trade Secrets leading to a plethora of Chesterton's Fences being basically guaranteed to litter the economic landscape.

[strbean]

I think the real irony is that much of the time fences exist because of the quirks (fences) of some other system you are stuck with. Sometimes it feels like it is fences all the way down. Other times, you work your way down 5 layers of dependencies and discover that the whole pile of ugliness is because the core system is designed around physically mailing boxes full of reel-to-reel tapes. When that is the case, there is potential for a cascade of "lean modern apps" to de-cruft an industry.