#chestertonsfence — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #chestertonsfence, aggregated by home.social.
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It's the hubris that gets me.
"Look at all this complexity! What purpose does it serve? Let us clear it all away and start fresh, and create a clean, fast replacement for all of this!"
Chesterton's coreutils.
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"Chesterton's Fence":
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. 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.”
— https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
#ChestertonsFence #CoreUtils #Rewrite #UIDesign
P.S. Credit for introducing me to this term: https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/116517200212865151
cc: @ChuckMcManis -
The choice of language isn't going to help much if the people writing the rusty replacements for decades-old tools don't bother to understand the security issues and attack surfaces that led to the design of those tools in the first place.
Similarly, Linux distributions shipping #screensaver implementations that are essentially nothing but a login-bypass mechanism that wastes CPU/GPU cycles.
#Rust #C #secure #design #tool #software #XScreenSaver #attack #Chesterton #ChestertonsFence #fence