i uh spend a lot of time thinking about whether various surprising software design choices are
a) intrinsic to the problem domain ("it turns out it DOES make sense!”)
b) made sense historically ("this made sense in 1992, but it didn't age well”)
c) just a typo/mistake (the "Referer" header)
d) related to budget/time constraints (“well, prototyping with shell scripts is fast!”)
e) cultural/organizational (“well, Google is the main funder for this project, and…”)
f) something else
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An IMO common variant of (b) is "this thing existed for a totally different reason and was good enough here". I mention this explicitly, because it's a variant of (b) that can happen without ~any passage of time.
