3 ms·

No doubt dozens of devs will throw in their own 10k LOC story here, and yes it's painful to watch so many people having professional cramps over it. But don't

No doubt dozens of devs will throw in their own 10k LOC story here, and yes it's painful to watch so many people having professional cramps over it. But don't forget society itself if governed by OOM larger bits of text with no referential integrity, no machine to tell you if it's inconsistent, and no way to test anything, other than making humans write more text to each other and occasionally show up in court. The law itself, even parts of it like the tax code, and regulations on various areas, are a melange of text and cultural understandings between lawyers, judges and government. We collect the data for this machine in the form of contracts and receipts, and it piles up in mountains. As with code, it's not just legal professionals who have to deal with law. It spills into everyone's life, and there's nothing to do about it other than either guess what to do or pay a pro to tell you what to do.

cormacrelf 5y ago
You are wrong to say there's no way to test anything. Imagine an enormous AI generating test cases for you constantly, in an adversarial fashion, with built-in rewards for advancing a more correct understanding of the text. Lawyers call this "testing", rightly so. If you are interested in efficiency / cost-effectiveness, it's got lots to be desired. But if you are interested in the internal integrity of the document etc, then this is better than almost anything developers have. I hate these words as I type them but the law is also "agile" (ugh). It gets modified as it's used. It does not need high-assurance machine-verified "referential integrity". In my entire course of studying the law I don't think I've seen a single legal dispute over a problem of referential integrity. Mistakes, especially drafting mistakes, are corrected on the fly pretty much everywhere they appear, and then they disappear. For a dev, using the wrong variable name in a bad language could mean you introduce a huge security vulnerability and massive loss of trust. (Or if you write smart contracts, $100M down the drain.) For lawyers, referring to the wrong section has essentially zero consequences. Nobody cares. Maybe you get a funny look from a senior. Finally re the 10k LOC tangent that this is supposed to be connected to, I'm not really sure what you're complaining about. You get "10kLOC" cases, but you also get well-organised practice guides & bench books. Laws in statute are typically very well organised, in my experience about 5-10x better than the average codebase. Laws are organising large swaths of the sum total of human endeavour, just as code does. I would say developers are behind overall, which makes sense for a discipline that's less than a century old.

cormacrelf 5y ago

You are wrong to say there's no way to test anything. Imagine an enormous AI generating test cases for you constantly, in an adversarial fashion, with built-in rewards for advancing a more correct understanding of the text. Lawyers call this "testing", rightly so. If you are interested in efficiency / cost-effectiveness, it's got lots to be desired. But if you are interested in the internal integrity of the document etc, then this is better than almost anything developers have. I hate these words as I type them but the law is also "agile" (ugh). It gets modified as it's used. It does not need high-assurance machine-verified "referential integrity". In my entire course of studying the law I don't think I've seen a single legal dispute over a problem of referential integrity. Mistakes, especially drafting mistakes, are corrected on the fly pretty much everywhere they appear, and then they disappear. For a dev, using the wrong variable name in a bad language could mean you introduce a huge security vulnerability and massive loss of trust. (Or if you write smart contracts, $100M down the drain.) For lawyers, referring to the wrong section has essentially zero consequences. Nobody cares. Maybe you get a funny look from a senior. Finally re the 10k LOC tangent that this is supposed to be connected to, I'm not really sure what you're complaining about. You get "10kLOC" cases, but you also get well-organised practice guides & bench books. Laws in statute are typically very well organised, in my experience about 5-10x better than the average codebase. Laws are organising large swaths of the sum total of human endeavour, just as code does. I would say developers are behind overall, which makes sense for a discipline that's less than a century old.