Chesterton's Fence should be held in disrepute in this day and age, at least among people familiar with software. The majority of said software being bloated because of an instinctive application of Chesterton's Fence.
80% of migrations out there (warning: made up statistic) happen because the system became too complex to maintain, and most of that complexity comes from people implicitly invoking Chesterton’s fence in one way or another, many, many times.
Yes, there are cases where it’s wise to follow Chesterton’s advice. But many more cases where that’s just lazyness disguised as wisdom.
Still, I think we should sometimes be bold enough to call out when we think that the Emperor has no clothes. In this case, Chesterton's fence is much less deep than it's made out to be.
The guy who wants to take it down, that's at least a valuable proposition. He's trying to decrease entropy. He's at least trying to put up a fight with the natural state of affairs that things become more disordered, more cluttered, more messy.
The guy who shuts him down, he's lazy. He's not willing to put in the work himself to see why the fence is useful. He's putting the burden of proof on the guy who at least is trying to do the good thing.
And many times guy nb 1 will just say, "well then, I tried, but there's opposition, and I don't have the time and energy to fight this battle".
And the fence will stay there.
And for each 1 useful fence that should stay there, there are 100 rotten ones that shouldn't.
The thing is, this is so entrenched, that people don't even try anymore. Maybe it's Pavlovian.
I'm saying this: we should at least admire those who even contemplate taking down a fence. And those who take the risk to speak out that the fence should be taken down.
Instead, we admire Chesterton. Which happens to be quite convenient too. Because we are lazy.
Oh, don't worry, I'm lazy too. How many times in my life didn't I say "this is a need to have thing and this is a nice to have thing. Considering the urgency, I'll deliver the need to have one, and leave the nice to have for another day".
In other words, how many fences didn't I leave the fence in the road? I'm guilty. But at least, I don't feel proud and wise about it.
It’s a good idea inasmuch as the ideas you encounter have thought behind them more often than people think. In a local environment with thoughtless decisions, sure, don’t apply that heuristic. I think in general most people under-invest in understanding why the “fence” is there, and so I disagree that it’s a bad heuristic.
I also disagree with the specific claim that software bloat is due to repeated application of Chesterton’s fence; I think bloat is caused by a lack of thought about what is needed and laziness around pruning dead code, rather than thinking about justifications for past decisions and then deferring to them.
