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Yeah they tried this in the late 19th and early 20th century. The problem (actually very similar to real strongly typed languages) is everything gets very verbo

Yeah they tried this in the late 19th and early 20th century. The problem (actually very similar to real strongly typed languages) is everything gets very verbose and impractical for ordinary people. Actually you could argue that we have indeed created a strongly typed dialect of English which is legalese. So a version that is very precise but to complex and verbose for most people and most spheres in life

raffraffraff 3y ago
You say that legalese is strongly typed, but it is not. We have clashing legislation. As complex and verbose as legalese is, it is still interpreted by humans: lawyers, judges, politicians, the attorney general. My argument is that while we cannot enforce strong typing in regular speech (conversations, social media, news) we should enforce it in legalese and policy. In other words, we need a compiler. I would love to run the statute book through the equivalent of the Rust compiler just to see how many instances we have of clashing rights, circular dependencies, due to there being wildly different definitions for words. Imagine if new policy had to be compiled with current statute book monorepo? It would get a hard "nope" in many cases. Not only could it prevent bad legislation, it could be used to point at existing "bad policy" that blocks good legislation. Imagine if each country had a laundry list of known bugs in it's laws? I mean, you'd want to know, wouldn't you? At the moment we need to wait until somebody tests a law before we realize it's unenforceable or unfair