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CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

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Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#161

Post by Martinussen »

altair8800 wrote: post #110
0x9b wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games are activities bound by rules. Laws are rules for government/governed. AFAIK There's not really a programming language specific for describing how players interact in a game, so although there's no reason you couldn't implement it in any old programming language. I guess the same thing could be said of the law too until Catala.

Wouldn’t that just be writing test cases against the business logic of your game?

I assume they're talking about tabletop/board games and such, not video games.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#162

Post by mdaniel »

thargor90 wrote: post #77

Too have fun with laws/rule systems take a look at nomic

linky-linky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

an example of the game rules: https://agoranomic.org/ruleset/slr.txt

In the context of this thread, I'm sad that the game rules don't appear to be in a constrained vocabulary

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#163

Post by LudwigNagasena »

tsimionescu wrote: post #147
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words almost always mean almost exactly what they mean in plain English. That’s why the law is a huge mess. As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.

I don't agree that the law is a huge mess. It is certainly far less of a mess than any code base I've ever seen, given the gigantic scope of what it applies to, and how many people if affects. Note that the legal system is indeed a huge mess, but that happens because of many other reasons - not a problem with the wording or vagueness of the law, but with the explicit (malicious) intentions of law-makers, judges, poli…

> How many people have been improperly punsihed/set free because of a poor interpretation of the word "child" in a specific law?

How many improperly punished people is good enough? How many cases go to Supreme Court because the amount of needless ambiguity just adds up, one word at a time?

> This is far more relevant than every law taking up valuable space to define what such a common word means.

Right? Why do many laws redefine it?

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#164

Post by gorenb »

tsimionescu wrote: post #136
jeppester wrote: post #104

For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all the time. I think this is truly awesome. Every law should be written in a language like this, and presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent formatting rules. Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the law language. I belie…

This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…

As someone who has tried to read the Black’s law dictionary once, I must tell you that the law does use a lot of formal language.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#165

Post by mschuster91 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #144
tsimionescu wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…

The words almost always mean almost exactly what they mean in plain English. That’s why the law is a huge mess. As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.

> As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.

Which is why it is the common standard in German law to define every possibly unclear term either in the relevant section of the law itself or in an introduction article.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#166

Post by jeppester »

tsimionescu wrote: post #151
jeppester wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't watch that kind of television much, but since I'm not a lawyer, my view of the world is probably too simplistic. Still I'd argue that normal language is very poor at handling that tangle of references. A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form. When I've read (Danish) laws, I've often thought that they would read better as if statements.…

> A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form. Not necessarily. Notation can only do so much to help with understanding. To understand 4+4=8 you still need to understand what's a number, what addition means, and what it means for two numbers to be equal. The same problem applies to the law, and it takes far more time to understand legal concepts th…

> Additionally, the law is not supposed to be some arcane discipline that you need to learn a new language for.

It would seem to me that reading laws has become an arcane discipline, partly due to it being expressed in a language with overly long sentences, which handles branches and references very poorly from a readability perspective.

> Imagine news anchors explaining that Biden agreed to add the lambda sign, but was heavily criticized by McConnell for his use of a monad instead of a plain for loop.

While that would surely be interesting to watch, I think we both know that's not what would happen.

Like I wouldn't ask you "number four plus sign number four equal sign X?"

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#167

Post by mschuster91 »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #82
kstrauser wrote: post #30

I think what I'd rather see is a standardize test suite format for laws that spells out the intentions. Once I lived in a state that proposed a very simple anti-child porn law with good intent, but it was too simple. It read sort of like "anyone sending explicit pictures of minors from a cell phone will be guilty of conveying child porn". It was written in the proper legal jargon, but wasn't a whole lot more detailed…

Mindblown. I went to law school and now work as a developer but never thought about it. Writing tests for laws should totally be a thing.

> Writing tests for laws should totally be a thing.

It is a thing already. In both the US and Germany it is common for lawmakers and regulators (e.g. the FCC which was here on HN to solicit comments a few days ago) to provide drafts of laws and regulations to interest groups so that these can raise issues they find.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#168

Post by tsimionescu »

da39a3ee wrote: post #160
tsimionescu wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…

I don't know if what you say about laws is correct, but it's certainly not a correct description of contracts. The general public is constantly confronted with utterly unreasonable legal documents: far too long, far too unclear, far too complex. The lawyers writing these, and the entities paying them, both know that the public will never read or understand them. It's pure cinicism.

Sure, but that wouldn't change if they were written in code. It would probably get much worse, in fact.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#169

Post by tsimionescu »

gorenb wrote: post #164
tsimionescu wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…

As someone who has tried to read the Black’s law dictionary once, I must tell you that the law does use a lot of formal language.

It does, to some extent, but it's still much closer to natural language than code. Expressing the law in code would turn this dial up to 11 and then some.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#170

Post by slazaro »

jrockway wrote: post #127
slazaro wrote: post #116

I know that naming is hard, and it has already been mentioned in the comments here but... I can't believe that somebody named a programming language with the exact same name as an existing natural language spoken by millions of people. It just seems like a bizarre decision that can't be a benefit at all and can only have negative consequences. Just googling things about it is going to be hard. Why immediately create…

This hasn't seemed to help or hurt the popularity of other languages. You've got hot beverages, single letters, snakes, gemstones, two letter verbs, oxidized steel, languages where two thirds of the name are symbols, etc. It doesn't seem to matter. It appears that society, and search engines, are well-equipped to deal with the concept of homonyms.

All of the things you mentioned are not languages themselves. If you google "catala language" (try it! seriously) you're going to get results for the natural language, not this one. It's just an unneeded roadblock that they placed on themselves.
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