Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#2It’s such a French thing to write software supporting French and English while making all the examples in README French...
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#3It’s such a French thing to write software supporting French and English while making all the examples in README French...
There is an example of the US tax code on the landing page of website (https://catala-lang.org/en/) so they actually seem to have also tried the language on English-written law!
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#4I think this topic is really interesting. There is also an effort to encode US law: https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal... (It's independent of this one as far as I know)
Wouldn't it be great to have laws managed in a git repo.
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#5how does it handle the effective date of a new rule, or retro active rule?
That is a challenge in writing billing or insurance policies management applications.
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#6I think this topic is really interesting. There is also an effort to encode US law: https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal... (It's independent of this one as far as I know) Wouldn't it be great to have laws managed in a git repo.
How do those similar projects actually handle ambiguously written laws? All that I see in Catala paper is basically "let this whole thing bounce back and forth between lawyer and programmer until it becomes unambiguous."
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#7I think this topic is really interesting. There is also an effort to encode US law: https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal... (It's independent of this one as far as I know) Wouldn't it be great to have laws managed in a git repo.
How do those similar projects actually handle ambiguously written laws? All that I see in Catala paper is basically "let this whole thing bounce back and forth between lawyer and programmer until it becomes unambiguous."
To be honest I don't really know in detail. There is an interesting paper about "Computational Law": http://logic.stanford.edu/publications/genesereth/complaw.pd... which says (§3):
Computational Law derives its power from its emphasis on deductive reasoning. As such, it simply cannot be applied in cases requiring analogical or inductive reasoning. Fortunately, it is sometimes the case that there are enough judicial rulings that the net result is, in effect, a set of categorical constraints even where the original wording of the regulations is not definitive. And, in such cases, Computational Law can be applied to the combination of regulatory and judicial law.
I guess this is why the French programmers are concentrating on the tax code which might be more precisely written!
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#8I think this topic is really interesting. There is also an effort to encode US law: https://law.stanford.edu/codex-the-stanford-center-for-legal... (It's independent of this one as far as I know) Wouldn't it be great to have laws managed in a git repo.
I agree. There are a couple interesting platform pieces before things start getting really interesting:
1) Getting US laws encoded in GitHub
2) Building a better proof of identity/residence verification provider that feels more like Authy and less like shitty SSN/identity questions, which provides a semi-anonymous user ID and geo range
3) Building a distributed consensus layer on top of that which makes it easy to conduct and tally anonymous polls across geo ranges for identity/geo verified users
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#9I can’t think a worse name for a programming language that of an actual language.
Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming
#10I can’t think a worse name for a programming language that of an actual language.
> The language is named after Pierre Catala, a professor of law who pionneered the French legaltech by creating a computer database of law cases, Juris-Data.