211–220 of 301 posts
I don't disagree with this assumption outright, but it's certainly not obvious to me that it is correct, and the authors appear to present no arguments supporting the same.
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.
> 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 see how a language is going to solve this. This isn't really an issue of language, it's an issue with ambiguity in the very intent itself. That's why we have judges, who interpret that intent.
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I worked for a company that translated certain kinds of legal contract into what was effectively a DSL. They could then be represented in a simplified way. That was the whole business. The CEO (a lawyer) claimed that the lawyers who wrote these things would deliberately and unnecesarily overcomplicate them so that they could maximize billable hours. I think they could quite easily have been templated using a DSL but…
The text of a contract can either be long and very explicit, or short but full of implicit assumptions. A DSL is the second kind: you encode those assumptions I the structure of the DSL and the text as written is based on all of those assumptions. The problem than becomes that anyone who wants to understand the contract now has to read not just the contract as written, but also all of the definition of the DSL itself…
I don't think there's much of a problem with actually reasoning about a law's text that a computer can help solve. The complicated bit is weighing equities, which still requires humans and lawyers.
+1. I see one benefit of this language -- it could make it much easier to write programs to compute taxes and benefits. Beyond that I don't see what it could possibly offer. Are there any lawmakers, lawyers or judges excited about this, or is it only programmers?
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…
And the links! OMG, you could trace precedents and justifications and citations all the way back to the ur-utterances of Hammurabi. Reading that stuff could be quite educational.
Linting and type checking the existing codebase would also be more helpful than rewriting everything in a new language. Enforcing size constraints on vocabulary and word count. Cross referencing between different legal systems. Throwing out dead laws that are no longer executed in prod. Profiling the efficiency of existing laws to find hot spots.
There’s little incentive to do this when the current system is run by a cadre of highly trained legacy COBOL programmers. I’d pick a very small part of the system — incorporate a new city and start from the ground up — and take it from there with the clear eyed expectation that a full rewrite is going to take a century.
This project seems to implicitly assume that a formally specified code of laws, where statutes can be interpreted largely mechanistically, is a good thing (and by extension, that the existing system of human interpreters with discretion and margins of error is a problem to be overcome). I don't disagree with this assumption outright, but it's certainly not obvious to me that it is correct, and the authors appear to p…
As someone who is familiar with the process of turning statutes into code, I can appreciate what this project endeavors to do, even if the value is limited to providing clarification for software developers.
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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.
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.
> 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 see how a language is going to solve this. This isn't really an issue of language, it's an issue with ambiguity in the very intent itself. That's why we have judges, who interpret that intent.
This project seems to implicitly assume that a formally specified code of laws, where statutes can be interpreted largely mechanistically, is a good thing (and by extension, that the existing system of human interpreters with discretion and margins of error is a problem to be overcome). I don't disagree with this assumption outright, but it's certainly not obvious to me that it is correct, and the authors appear to p…