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CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

453 points by gorenb 3y ago

brap 3y ago
It’s good that they made it not turing complete but they should probably also force an upper bound on law complexity
- canadianfella 3y ago
  [dead]
nymiro 3y ago
I was a bit confused by the fact that my first language is Catalan, which in Catalan is spelled Català. So yeah, imagine someone proposing a language specification for the law called English.
plumeria 3y ago
The Catalan language name is written Català.
- melenaboija 3y ago
  It is named after a French guy called Pierre Catala, not the language. Probably the name comes from the language but according to the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent. > 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. The research group that he led in the late 1960s, the Centre d’études et de traitement de l’information juridique (CETIJ), has also influenced the creation by state conselor Lucien Mehl of the Centre de recherches et développement en informatique juridique (CENIJ), which eventually transformed into the entity managing the LegiFrance website, acting as the public service of legislative documentation.
  - racked 3y ago
    The commenter was maybe pointing out a naming conflict.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - pxc 3y ago
    > the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent. 'à' has a grave accent, not an acute accent.
    - melenaboija 3y ago
      Yups right, sorry :(
      - pxc 3y ago
        I just figured that since you cared to name the specific accent character (most people probably wouldn't!), you'd care about the mixup too. :)
  - Anduia 3y ago
    Their research group is called 'Prosecco', and another of their projects at Inria is 'Squirrel'... Another one is F* (pronounced F star). I imagine that they find their naming choices amusing.
- entwife 3y ago
  I also came to comment that the software's name might cause confusion with the human language, Catalan.
- wageslave99 3y ago
  Not related to the Catalan language but to Pierre Catala: https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala#pierre-catala https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala#pierre-catala (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Catala https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Catala)
Horffupolde 3y ago
How is this different from Prolog?
Supply5411 3y ago
Very cool. Pessimistically, I think that having a clear, understandable view of legal text so that people can navigate the law safely is against a lot of entrenched interests.
- tgv 3y ago
  I don't think it's that. It's hard to write legal texts, and sometimes it's better to be vague, so the courts have some freedom when establishing jurisprudence. Treaties can be written with vague wording to allow parties to sign it, even if there isn't 100% agreement. That's an old practice.
  - sixo 3y ago
    It is probably better to be intentionally and clearly unclear when you want to be, and clearly algorithmic when you want that, than just stir it all together in the name of judicial discretion.
  - Kretinsky 3y ago
    On the contrary, it's much better to have very clear text, otherwise it will turn against the citizen. Imagine that you have an income tax where "income" isn't clearly defined. Someone will end up with an audit and a lawsuit from the tax office because their definition will be, of course, extensive (every income, including non-realized capital gains) whereas most citizens would only consider salaries. In the end, you create legal uncertainty, and give courts way too much power. For the record, I used to work for my country's government, and had to evaluate some laws in making that were written in an abstruse way. When I asked why, the civil servant told me that it was so "they could pick the most favorable meaning in the case of a lawsuit".
    - bjt 3y ago
      It's a balance. If you get too specific then your laws quickly become outdated as technology and society evolve. Or you miss corner cases by not enumerating every little scenario. So there are different tiers to deal with this. - Constitution - Very abstract and very rarely changed. - Statute - Sometimes abstract, sometimes specific. - Administrative rules. Very technical but still intended for broad application. - Individual court cases. Can be hyper specific.
cphoover 3y ago
This is interesting, and not to criticize, but I wonder if transformer model's accuracy in interpreting law will obviate the need for something like this. It would be interesting to train Large Language Transformer Models to generate this code for you based on the text in the laws. This way you have a deterministic testable output, without risk of hallucinations.
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  Even LLMs would be better off with a clear unambiguous syntax to define human laws and rules.
jrm4 3y ago
Lawyer here. Oh, this again. I suppose this looks relatively harmless, but I'm always wary of "law is like computer code." The impulse to think this can strongly solve any real problem in the law is intuitively attractive, but I strongly predict this mostly never happens; it's the law's job to be intensely practical in the face of hard-edged "computer-like" rules. If anything, you get goofy confusion about what things "are?" My go-to on this is always the "smart contract" -- which can be useful little bits of automated robot money moving code, but emphatically are neither "smart" nor "contracts."
- diogenes4 3y ago
  > If anything, you get goofy confusion about what things "are?" My go-to on this is always the "smart contract" -- which can be useful little bits of automated robot money moving code, but emphatically are neither "smart" nor "contracts." They are contracts—just not legal contracts. One of many types of contracts in the world that are not legal constructs.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    Most contracts are intended to be enforceable by law, as far as I know. Which kind of non-enforceable contracts did you have in mind?
    - layer8 3y ago
      Software-interface contracts generally aren’t (cf. Design by Contract). The parent is correct insofar as the use of the word “contract” is not limited to contracts as defined by law.
      - jrm4 3y ago
        Right, I mean, I've heard this use and I think it's kind of silly. It's like calling a hopefully-completed-circuit in some device an "electric contract" or something like that.
version_five 3y ago
What problem does this solve? It appears to add precision where it's mostly already clear - perhaps it can enforce some kind of rigor... but then like the example given uses "fair market value" as a term which I'd expect to be the kind of thing that's in contention, rather than any of the actual "logic", and it doesn't help with that. The reason we have courts and lawyers is because of the need for interpretation beyond just writing good logic, so I don't see how this can really do anything. Or is it for something else?
- parineum 3y ago
  >It appears to add precision where it's mostly already clear - perhaps it can enforce some kind of rigor... I'd argue that the imprecision of law is more feature than bug. Rules as written have edge cases and, as long as the law is written in natural language, you can get a feel for their intent and that helps Judges decide what to do in those situations.
- 0thgen 3y ago
  I suppose a formalized legal language could: - help in quickly testing whether newly drafted laws contradict existing laws(without needing to memorize the existing legal code) - check for redundancies - checking whether removing one law affects any others - statistically analyze legal systems in different countries Assuming any of those are important issues in law. I'm not sure
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  Catala still produces plaintext legal documents at the end of the day but can be seen as a markup language for those documents. But because that markup language is a whole lot more precise than the legal text itself, it can be a bit more versatile. Examples of how this could be useful: - Reducing the overhead for maintaining a list of semantic translations of that legal code into other languages. Of course the official language is the only one that is "legal" but the other translations should be close enough to effectively express the nuance provided the language outputs are maintained by people who can actually speak those languages. - Producing machine executable proof or simulation code. This could be used for "fuzzing" the legal code to identify loopholes or unintended outcomes so that legislators can then propose improved terms to avoid those issues. This is by no means "making code law" but it provides an additional tool for understanding the law and how the many different parts of the legal code interact with each other. - Adding on to the previous example, sim code could be integrated into complex models for simulating the impact of legal changes on the economy at large or specific segments. - Finance related code can be used to generate a tool or API for validating tax, accounting, and compliance documents (as a first pass to catch errors early and reduce overhead) as well as to even prepare some of those documents. These tools often already exist but they are one or more steps removed from the actual legal definition which increases the risk of error as well as the overhead of maintaining them (which can potentially encourage rent seeking behavior by commercial providers of these tools). France actually is already doing this to a reasonable degree albeit the "codified" version is based on the law rather than the codified version producing plaintext law. The DGFiP [1] maintains a gitlab organisation [2] that includes both Catala and MLang [3] representations of different parts of the french legal code for exactly these purposes. 1. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_des_Finances_publiques https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_d... 2. https://gitlab.adullact.net/dgfip https://gitlab.adullact.net/dgfip 3. https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang
simplify 3y ago
Also see Logical English, a "Programming Language for Law and Ethics" https://virtuale.unibo.it/pluginfile.php/1273247/mod_unibores/content/0/Logical%20English%20for%20Law%20and%20Ethics_new2.pdf https://virtuale.unibo.it/pluginfile.php/1273247/mod_unibore...
blagund 3y ago
My hunch is, in any sufficiently large rule set, there will be inconsistencies. Handwaily think Gödel, or just the need for bounded domains in DDD. Humans (or, well, AI) is needed to cope with inconsistencies. That said, pointing out the fact of existence of inconsistencies could be very valuable. But a system needs to embrace them, not fight them.
- drdeca 3y ago
  Gödel’s theorems don’t imply inconsistency for all large systems (unless “large” is taken to mean something strange), just for systems which are both not super-weak in what they can say, and complete (or if they have their own consistency as a theorem). I don’t think Gödel’s theorems particularly support the claim you’re making. In fact, here is an argument that a consistent rule-set (either can be extended to something consistent and complete, or ) can be extended to be made arbitrarily large and consistent: take a ruleset which is consistent, but for which there is something for which it has no prescription one way or the other (neither explicitly nor implied collectively by other rules) (I.e. “not complete”). Then, add a rule specifying that thing and nothing else which isn’t implied by that thing. This will be consistent, as if it were not, then the negation of the rule added would have already been an implication. This will either yield a larger ruleset of the same kind (consistent and incomplete), or it will yield one which is consistent and complete. Gödel’s theorems show that if the ruleset is an axiom system which is sufficiently expressive (e.g. contains Peano arithmetic) then the latter cannot be the result. So in this case, there are arbitrarily large extensions of the rule-set. If it isn’t an axiom system, or is one for a rather weak system, then the “the result is a consistent and complete system” option, well, why would you want it to be larger? Edit: perhaps what you are calling “inconsistencies” are what I would just call “exceptions”/“exceptional cases”? To my mind, “embracing an inconsistency” doesn’t seem to make much sense in the case of law? Something has to be what actually happens. We (whether fortunately or unfortunately) cannot bring an actual contradiction into reality. Well, I suppose if one takes a sub-truth(not sure if this is the right terminology? I mean the opposite of super-truth) approach to vague statements, one might say that a somewhat-bald man causes the statement “that man is bald, and also that man is not bald” to be true (and also false), and as such “bring a contradiction into reality”, but that’s not what I mean by the phrase. I mean there is no full precise-ification of any statement, which we can cause to be simultaneously true and false irl. Those acting as agents of the law must behave in some particular way. When legal requirements contradict, people will not satisfy both of them. Perhaps one will be considered to take priority. Perhaps a compromise position between the requirements will be sought. Perhaps it will be left to the judgement of those following it in a case-by-case basis. But in none of these cases is a contradiction implemented. Can they really be said to be embracing the contradiction? Upon writing this edit I realize that I’m probably misinterpreting that part of your comment. I suppose the thing you are saying to embrace is not the individual contradictions themselves, so much as the system’s rules-as-written having contradictions, and therefore the necessity of dealing with such contradictions when implementing the rules, as the scenarios to which the contradictory statements apply, occur.
EPWN3D 3y ago
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.
- btilly 3y ago
  I think you meant, "...humans, lawyers, and bribes." No, I don't have a lot of faith in our legal system. Why do you ask?
  - post-it 3y ago
    Sure, but this new language wouldn't help with that.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Absolutely. Although the clarity by creating algorithms from tax tables can be helpful, and sometimes the wording seems ambiguous. Although you probably also need lots and lots of examples. (It is as if you need unit tests!)
  - barryrandall 3y ago
    Most tax-related rules in the US are specified in an XML-based business rules language. That's partly how tax prep companies are able to get rules that don't finalize until 12/31 into products that have to ship 6 weeks later.
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  +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?
  - ChoHag 3y ago
    [dead]
WanderPanda 3y ago
Would be so funny if all the compute moves from AI to finding loopholes in the programmatically defined law.
- gorenb 3y ago
  "haha! actually, if you give it this input, the program crashes! i can finally steal pillows from the bookstore!"
kstrauser 3y ago
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 than that. I called the sponsor of the bill and asked if that meant if my hypothetical daughter sent a naked picture of herself to her boyfriend, then wouldn't she be a felon under his new law? He had an "oh, crap, that's not what I meant!" reaction and ended up withdrawing the bill so it could be re-written. (Aside: I felt pretty good about that. Props to the legislator for being quick to understand and respond appropriately!) Imagine if that were handled like program code, with a test like: * This law does not apply to minors sending pictures of themselves. That would do a few big things: It would make legislators be clear about what they mean. "Oh, we'd never use this online child safety law to ban pro-trans content from the Internet!" "Great! Let's add that as a test case then." I confess that this is a deal breaker: politicians don't like being pinned down like that. It would probably make it easier to write laws that reflect those intentions. "Hey, that law as written would apply to a 15 year old sexting her boyfriend! The code doesn't pass the tests." Future courts could use that to evaluate a law's intent. "The wording says it applies to 15 year olds sending selfies, but the tests are explicit that it wasn't meant to. Not guilty." I'm sure this couldn't happen for a hundred reasons, but I can dream.
- jrm4 3y ago
  I partly like this idea in theory, but believe it is literally 100% impossible to come up with a better "test suite" than "the actual court system?"
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    The courts have to evaluate what they think the law's drafters meant: Yeah, it says this, but it's obvious the legislators didn't mean for it to be read that way. It'd be nice if there were footnotes that expounded on what the authors were trying to accomplish to help courts interpret the laws.
29athrowaway 3y ago
I think having a "linter" for laws can be beneficial. It can help producing laws that are easier to read and understand. Having a "compiler" for laws can help identifying conflicts between different codes of law. e.g.: Imagine having a compiler error when a law is unconstitutional from a logical standpoint. But verifying the "business logic" (e.g.: what is the spirit or intent of the law?) of the law will remain a human intelligence task.
t2b1 3y ago
Completely unrelated to Catalan (Català), the language spoken in Catalonia (Catalunya). I think if someone wants to google a question about this, "catala language beginner hello world" won't help them much.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- medstrom 3y ago
  I can only conclude that they didn't know that. It's such a bad name; we won't even be able to google "catala lang" because ... Catala is also a "lang"! Imagine someone creates a programming language called Russian. Good luck googling "russian lang".
  - _visgean 3y ago
    given that the major contributors seems to be from paris / bordeaux i am pretty sure they know about catalan.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > given that the major contributors seems to be from paris / bordeaux i am pretty sure they know about catalan. Yes, but did they know that català is Catalan for Catalan? In French, as in English, it is catalan instead (well, English always capitalises it, French doesn't, but the spelling is identical).
- hiq 3y ago
  You'd write "catalalang" just like you write "golang", if you really need. I think in most context, search engines would be able to infer the context.
  - gilcot 3y ago
    Smart…
- deleted 3y ago
chillbill 3y ago
[dead]
kderbyma 3y ago
Started something like this years ago with a company that ended up pivoting to a slightly different direction after a while. glad to see something in open source space.
qaq 3y ago
Naming is hard Catala is cardsharper (cheat) in russian.
- juunpp 3y ago
  Catala is also a human language.
turtleyacht 3y ago
It would be interesting to also "weave" in test cases. The workface of logic statements is exactly where bugs are introduced. Especially around temporal events, and that goes to formal models (and even more bugs). Typically, if there is a rule around height, there would be at least three tests¹: one taller, one equal to, and one shorter. (Without types or something, then also negative, null, and max/min boundary inputs too.) So you could have tests based on timelines, like Given a regulation is passed in 3 months And parties are prevented from exercising B But "17 tons" of waste are dumped anyway And ... When ... Then ... Having a model checker integrated would be a boon. Maybe we could have DevOps-like pipelines in formally-verified legislature (or at least the encoding of language to code). ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_partitioning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_partitioning
- natn 3y ago
  imagine... TTD applied to laws. Or take it a step further, write a test suite and automatically generate a range of possible laws that satisfy the tests.
- octacat 3y ago
  It will not compile (sarcasm). Many laws are written with a lot of double meaning (recent eu regulations on allowing or not allowing russian cars is a good example). Though, it could be a good idea to find all the possible double meanings or vague definition when trying to "digitise" the laws into the programming language.
  - ragulpr 3y ago
    Right, some laws are just ftp-dragged & dropped to prod, understanding that it doesn't compile yet. But if legislator managed to express the _intention_ the courts will over time add and make all test cases pass. I'm sure the mentality of a PHP developer running a successful but insane legacy site is a better model for this than a perfect OCAML project :)
- az09mugen 3y ago
  That would be nice also to have unit tests
greybox 3y ago
I'd be interested in seeing something like this for verifying game designs / new game rules given an existing design
- GolDDranks 3y ago
  Why? What do game designs have to do with law?
  - 0x9b 3y ago
    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.
    - altair8800 3y ago
      Wouldn’t that just be writing test cases against the business logic of your game?
      - Martinussen 3y ago
        I assume they're talking about tabletop/board games and such, not video games.
        GolDDranks 3y ago
        Ahh, that was the context I was missing. Indeed, makes sense for board games.
RedNifre 3y ago
Will it help? On the one hand, I think it would be fantastic, if you had automated tests for the law. For example, when German politicians introduced the "hacker law", you could have pointed out that "This new law would break the 'security researchers need to be allowed to do penetration testing' test". On the other hand, "Brexit is in conflict with the Good Friday Agreement, we need a solution for Nothern Ireland." was known without machine readable laws and test, but politicians ignored it anyway. Maybe what's needed is a law that outlaws test-breaking laws and requires politicians to fix the tests first, but I bet that would just result in a lot of "commented" tests.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- staunton 3y ago
  If you make a law against "test-breaking" people will just break that law.
gandalfgeek 3y ago
(self plug) They published a paper describing the language https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939, and here's a short video summary of it: https://youtu.be/OiaFTFSAa1I https://youtu.be/OiaFTFSAa1I
thargor90 3y ago
Too have fun with laws/rule systems take a look at nomic
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mdaniel 3y ago
  linky-linky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic an example of the game rules: https://agoranomic.org/ruleset/slr.txt 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
dazzaji 3y ago
I’m really interested in this project as another way to computationally express and use law. For more color on the project, here is a demo and discussion “Idea Flow” session I did with the project leads: https://law.mit.edu/pub/ideaflow8 https://law.mit.edu/pub/ideaflow8
lockedinspace 3y ago
Thought this was realated to the Catalan western romance language. Naming could confuse some Spanish and French users.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gield 3y ago
  Don't forget about the Andorran users!
dang 3y ago
Related: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24948342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24948342 - Oct 2020 (37 comments)
eddtests 3y ago
This is really cool! But I guess it’s biggest drawback is being unable to deal with case law?
cpeterso 3y ago
Interesting that their “money” type doesn’t allow fractional cents or track the currency. And the only collection type is a fixed-sized list. I can imagine a lot of other useful base types that would be useful for laws about the real world, such as physical units like meters. https://catala-lang.org/en/examples/tutorial#The%20Catala%20language%20tutorial-Catala%20values https://catala-lang.org/en/examples/tutorial#The%20Catala%20...
codedokode 3y ago
Laws are often written in most vague language to allow wide interpretation, especially laws regarding treason, communism, foreign agents, anti-war speeches and such things. Programming language won't help here.
- anticristi 3y ago
  I'm also somewhat skeptical. How would a program deduce that "cookies and similar technologies" will mean localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB, etc. Remember that the law was written well before some of these technologies even existed.
yieldcrv 3y ago
without formal training, one key thing I picked up is that most public understanding of legal concepts diverges from court understanding because law follows logical and/or gates so “and” isnt a list of accepted criteria, it is a list of things that must be simultaneously satisfied but its only using logical gates most of the time this is a good step in showing that. not a panacea but a good step!
jeppester 3y ago
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 believe it would greatly improve everyone's ability to read laws and be confident about their understanding of them, which would be a huge boon for society.
- swayvil 3y ago
  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.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Am actually working on a project like this. Not quite to the level of insanity you're thinking about, but certainly a couple of thousand years.
  - willsoon 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jll29 3y ago
    Former R&D director of legaltech company here. Lawyers already use tools that link everything. For instance in the U.S., the Westlaw search engine for legal cases is such a tool, it can parse legal citations and turns them into hyperlinks. It rankes cases given a query based on a state-of-the art machine learning based IR method, and it is aware of cases in the ranking that are currently overturned by higher courts (shown as red flags) or being reviewed (shown as yellow flags). The software can also predict the outcome of a legal case and recommend courses of action that makes winning more likely. It includes ruling statistics about all sitting judges. Curiously, lawyers like to see the world as static, they do not like e.g. search results to differ between sessions, but of course cases get decided dynamically every day, which must necessarily also change the search results for any given query. If people want to see what is the state of the art in AI and the law, I recommend you have a look at "AI & the Law" (ICAIL, the annual conference and the journal of the same name).
lightedman 3y ago
No way would this ever be a good idea. Language changes too much, be it human or machine. This is why you need flexibility, not a rigid structure, in making law.
EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Something like this got passing mention in Greg Bear's [1] book Moving Mars (1993) [2], under the name Legal Logic. The (human) Martians used it with AI assistance to formulate legislation for their newly independent society. For those who don't know, Greg Bear was a well-known SF author who died less than a year ago. His passing was discussed here at the time [3] [4]. He was one of the authors that influenced my youth a great deal, and I particularly remember this aspect of Moving Mars as catching my imagination, so will be interested to read what Catala has to offer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Mars [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679668 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675708
nologic01 3y ago
This seems like a worthy project but I think its landing page should define the scope of what it aims to do in more concrete terms. Otherwise it runs the risk of being seen as overambitious and open ended without a concrete problem to solve. E.g. its not clear if there is an explicit or implicit ontology against which the validity of any codification can be checked.
sesm 3y ago
This project is doing code -> text, right? But then, the first line of description in Github says: > Catala is a domain-specific language for deriving faithful-by-construction algorithms from legislative texts. This reads like 'text -> code', which is the opposite of what this project seems to be doing.
ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
As someone who speaks Catalan, I find the name collision with the language referred to in the article most unfortunate.
- andrewnicolalde 3y ago
  Why unfortunate? Also, I love your username. I think many of us could have guessed that you spoke Catalan from that alone ;).
  - ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
    Makes it quite difficult to search for it, both being "language" "Catal{a,à}".
swayvil 3y ago
A software for people. For dictating human behavior. Is that what we're looking at here?
wcerfgba 3y ago
What are the authors' goals, what is their intended purpose? I can't find a mission statement on their website.
slazaro 3y ago
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 potential problems for yourselves when you can choose a name that's not an issue?
- mrdoob2 3y ago
  Came here to share the same thought.
- mathisfun123 3y ago
  goofy; the language you're talking about is Catalan of Catalonia, not `catala`. > Just googling things about it is going to be hard when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"? edit: fine, it's called catalá in catalonian itself - this is so pedantic now that i might as well at this point say that the missing diacritic is sufficient to disambiguate.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    Catalá is the name of the language in Catalan, is totally equivalent to saying "English" if you are a native. This is obviously a not innocent choice. At this level I don't believe in coincidences and CatalaLang makes it even more obvious. This looks like a veeeery obvious psy-op, or a independentist version of the old embrace, extend, extinguish. My bet is that as they can't stomach the basic legal concepts, they will try silently replace it by the new "updated" meaning of those concepts.
    - feliixh 3y ago
      Def a psyop. Classic Catalonian move of seizing independence by writing self determination laws in code and carefully introducing a bug that they can then exploit to secede.
  - 3y ago
pvaldes 3y ago
"We" will interpret the law for you and the judges, and "we" are not suspicious at all of having a hidden agenda to replace "the law" by "how we see the law" to benefit ourselves. Is this a joke?
llsf 3y ago
Can we use it to compute taxes ?
dathinab 3y ago
programmers love to propose using "programming language" or similar for law But this fails to realize that _ambiguity (in some ways) is a fundamental important part of law_. This is because the world itself is fundamental ambiguous (in some ways)/clear cut. Naturally not all ways of ambiguity are wanted. But you can be sure that with "code as law" the ways loopholes are abused will get worse in my opinion. I would even go as far that some many laws should be more focused on what should be upheld then the details how (which is fundamental less clear cut/more ambiguous).
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  Agreed. Although I don't think this is a bad idea, I think of the idea of perfectly defined laws and perfectly enforceable laws are terrifying. If every law on the books today were able to be perfectly enforced and perfectly monitored, our lives would be utterly miserable. I'm not going to argue that's a problem with laws vs. enforcement, but either way, our society is built around ambiguity and unequal enforcement of law.
  - dathinab 3y ago
    I'm not speaking about perfect enforcement. But about that law, in difference to what movies love to pretend, is not about clever word tricks and nit-picking formulations. (In court it still can be about clever arguing, including nit picking arguments if necessary.) But code _is_ about nit picking formulations at least if we ignore documentation, naming conventions etc. but lock solely at what the code does. Code is meant to be precise. Law is meant to be only as precise as necessary but no more then that. Or you could say it's meant to be as imprecise as viable. Code is about the specific case (in general). Law is about the generic case (in general), avoiding specific cases where possible. Code is made for machines to consume. Law is meant to be consumed with ambiguous defined context of the situations in (human) . This is so deeply rooted in law that I would argue it's (in general, with exceptions) not possible to translate any current laws to code without accidentally changing their meaning in a lot of subtle but meaningful cases.
  - brutusborn 3y ago
roguesupport 3y ago
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unstyledcontent 3y ago
Something to keep in mind is that the courts are not necessarily trying to determine the truth, but rather create a place to allow two parties that represent different interests duke it out. Not always what the courts are used for, but it's a different mentality than science or programming.
rsrsrs86 3y ago
I had so much trouble getting catala to even compile that I got frustrated. It’s a piece of academic code that’s very much abandoned
- a-priori 3y ago
  It's hardly abandoned. The git history shows activity almost every day over the last few months. It's clearly being actively developed.
Layvier 3y ago
Super interesting. I also think we would win with a kind of versioning system for laws, including a definite objective for a law from the time of it's creation, and constraints under which it should be questioned again
gmfawcett 3y ago
I was expecting Lojban, or something similar. I remember someone proposing Lojban as a tool that could improve the clarity of legal and contractual writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
ftxbro 3y ago
this is peak hacker news 'solve human conflict by using technology'
klysm 3y ago
Doesn’t TurboTax have some kind of DSL they use to encode all of the tax rules?
friend_and_foe 3y ago
That's really cool! I was puttering around with the idea of a ricardian compiler for legalese, basically a decompiler for something like this that could compile a legal text into clear logical rules. This would aid in proof checking for legal documents to ensure that they're compatible with existing law, that there are no (unintended lol) loopholes and the like. It would also be useful if you wanted to create self enforcing legal documents that can be enforced deterministically by machines, such as collateralized agreements, and finally, even though someone would still need to know legalese, it could make the development of such agreements easier for people and lower the bar tremendously. I wonder if anyone has built anything like that, if these guys have, or if anyone has built other interesting ricardian compilers.
p-e-w 3y ago
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 present no arguments supporting the same.
- steego 3y ago
  I suspect the motivation of this project is a lot more practical than what you’re projecting onto it, and I suspect you might be discounting how often law is transformed into code that runs on state IT systems. 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.
  - wiz21c 3y ago
    It is hugely useful. I worked on implementation of law in code for 10 years and the big problem is this: there's a constant communication between software devs and law poeple. For exmaple "did you code this like that ?", "why did the system did that ?", "if I code this way, does it reflect the law precisely ?". You have to constantly trnaslate from the code base to the language of lawyers and vice versa. Doing that with regular code is no good: regular code ends up mixing law code and technical code. Making a clear separation with a dedicated language is a big plus.
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- anon291 3y ago
  Some laws, like tax bracket computation probably are fine but most laws should not be codified like this in my opinion
  - 3y ago
gorgoiler 3y ago
Laws would do well to follow the rules of software. Small modules with clear responsibilities with an emphasis on readability and test cases that are run before you go to prod, for example. Testing is expensive so I understand why the legal system would rather just push their code and fix bugs when they see them in the wild. The collateral damage for people caught up in real life test cases is tolerable, especially when it’s someone else footing the bill. 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.
- p0w3n3d 3y ago
  Moreover I think laws work similarly to software. People wrote law, others find a loophole and use it, the people fix it with patches, and so on...
alexvitkov 3y ago
Although I agree on principle, the closest thing we have to 'formal law' are smart contracts, and already billions of dollars have been stolen from bugs in these, despite barely anyone using them. I have some reservations for basing our entire legal system on code.
- krsdcbl 3y ago
  I think that comparison is way off. Smart contracts are much more comparable to "a webshop", than actual logic describing rules of arbitrage or other concepts at play in "law".
  - alexvitkov 3y ago
    A smart contract is a well-defined series of rules, that anyone can choose to interact with and have certain well-specified guarentees of the outcome -- in that sense I think there are quite a few similarities, the main differences being that a smart contract deals with a way narrower set of concepts and is immutable.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      Part of the problem with smart contracts is the term usually means Ethereum programs, which are usually neither good law nor good programming. They're not only playing a game with high stakes but the actual programming environment is a textbook case of how not to do computing. You can't generalize much from the experience there, it'd be like judging all of computing by looking at piles of PHP written by drug-addled teenagers.
PeterStuer 3y ago
Ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. I used to spend a lott of time on business process automation, and even in those more structured and restricted settings trying to codify procedures most often fails. The reason is that reality has (a) so many edge cases that it very rapidly devolves into chasing down an ever diminishing ROI, (b) is unknown by the middle management and business analists, those that would have the authority to construct and sign off on it, and (c) relies on intelligent people applying creative pragmatic solutions to keep the business running and straightjacketing those into inflexible automatons is the most surefire way to sink the ship.
ctenb 3y ago
I would have a much easier time understanding government legislation if everything was provided in such language. I tried to compute my taxes by hand a month ago to see whether and how much money it would save if I enabled "loon middeling" (some Dutch law about income). But I couldn't figure it out. The explanations provided were ambgiuous in some subtle way, leading me to incorrect assumptions. In the end I did figure it out by reverse engineering a free third party calculation tool (which also was not correct, but putting their insight and my insight together made something that came close to the number on my belastingaanslag).
tanukiworld 3y ago
I'm actually in court later this month pertaining to some stolen traffic cones. Dismissed my lawyer just yesterday due to a dishonest swagger. I'll be preparing some documents using this after I prototype using a few frameworks. Will keep you posted.
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otikik 3y ago
The naming choice is really unfortunate. It's like naming a programming language "français", or "Deutsch" (or "English"). From the bottom of the readme: > The language is named after Pierre Catala I'd suggest changing it to PierreLang then.
- bibanez 3y ago
  "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." As a native Catalan speaker I was quite surprised with the name! But it makes sense, since it's quite a common surname!
ChristopherDrum 3y ago
This paper definitely has thoughts on the matter https://law.mit.edu/pub/interpretingtherulesofcode/release/4 https://law.mit.edu/pub/interpretingtherulesofcode/release/4 "As the Rules as Code movement gains momentum, questions are starting to be asked about the performance and practical effects of expressing law computationally. This article examines the strengths, weaknesses, and new opportunities of engaging with these emerging systems." The Future of Coding podcast covered it recently https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/065 https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/065 The abstract says, "Software code is built on rules. The way it enforces them is analogous in certain ways to the philosophical notion of legalism, under which citizens are expected to follow legal rules without thinking too hard about their meaning or consequences. By analogy, the opacity, immutability, immediacy, pervasiveness, private production, and ‘ruleishness’ of code amplify its ‘legalistic’ nature far beyond what could ever be imposed in the legal domain, however, raising significant questions about its legitimacy as a regulator." It's a complex paper/topic that I personally need more time to grasp before throwing my opinions around too heavily. But my first, knee-jerk reaction so far is that moving laws into code is a bad idea. Specifically, as the paper says, "...code by its very nature tends toward a kind of strong legalism. This is the case regardless of the intent of the programmer, however vicious or virtuous that may be." The "strong legalism" inherent in code means "the sovereign’s exercise of power is de facto legitimate, and thus not open to question." Not to be reductive, but that ain't good. I feel we've seen evidence of this path already, with (easily refuted, but somewhat common) claims like "data can't be biased" (for example). The tendency to blindly follow a computer's dictate with, "Well, the computer says this is so, so it must be so." is strong in our society at times, I think.
amluto 3y ago
Law is a mess, in part because its authors take shortcuts. For example, from the first example on CatalaLang's README.md: > If the property was acquired by gift [and various conditions apply], then for the purpose of determining loss the basis shall be such fair market value. [emphasis added] I think (and I'm not a lawyer or a tax expert) that this means that the basis of an asset can have a different value for the purpose of determining gain or determining loss. Wow, basis isn't just a number, although one might not notice this if one didn't read the six emphasized words. But the Catala code seems to completely ignore this. Oops. I filed an issue: https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala/issues/514 https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala/issues/514 In a real use case, I imagine that substantial refactoring of the parts that consume basis might be needed when one notices that the basis is not a number.
crabbone 3y ago
If anything, I'm grateful to this article for exposing me to this Bill Gates deposition. I had no idea he was so repugnant and incompetent liar. Sometimes, in my mind, I'm trying to justify the clearly bad actions by big corporations by saying something like "maybe they don't know" or "maybe they are in a tight spot between many bad choices", but here it's loud and clear that it was deliberate. He and his buddies knew what they were doing, they knew it was wrong and they didn't care. Neither had he the guts to own up to his wrongdoing.

453 points by gorenb 3y ago

brap 3y ago

It’s good that they made it not turing complete but they should probably also force an upper bound on law complexity

canadianfella 3y ago
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nymiro 3y ago

I was a bit confused by the fact that my first language is Catalan, which in Catalan is spelled Català. So yeah, imagine someone proposing a language specification for the law called English.

plumeria 3y ago

The Catalan language name is written Català.

melenaboija 3y ago
It is named after a French guy called Pierre Catala, not the language. Probably the name comes from the language but according to the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent. > 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. The research group that he led in the late 1960s, the Centre d’études et de traitement de l’information juridique (CETIJ), has also influenced the creation by state conselor Lucien Mehl of the Centre de recherches et développement en informatique juridique (CENIJ), which eventually transformed into the entity managing the LegiFrance website, acting as the public service of legislative documentation.
- racked 3y ago
  The commenter was maybe pointing out a naming conflict.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- pxc 3y ago
  > the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent. 'à' has a grave accent, not an acute accent.
  - melenaboija 3y ago
    Yups right, sorry :(
    - pxc 3y ago
      I just figured that since you cared to name the specific accent character (most people probably wouldn't!), you'd care about the mixup too. :)
- Anduia 3y ago
  Their research group is called 'Prosecco', and another of their projects at Inria is 'Squirrel'... Another one is F* (pronounced F star). I imagine that they find their naming choices amusing.
entwife 3y ago
I also came to comment that the software's name might cause confusion with the human language, Catalan.
wageslave99 3y ago
Not related to the Catalan language but to Pierre Catala: https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala#pierre-catala https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala#pierre-catala (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Catala https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Catala)

Horffupolde 3y ago

How is this different from Prolog?

Supply5411 3y ago

Very cool. Pessimistically, I think that having a clear, understandable view of legal text so that people can navigate the law safely is against a lot of entrenched interests.

tgv 3y ago
I don't think it's that. It's hard to write legal texts, and sometimes it's better to be vague, so the courts have some freedom when establishing jurisprudence. Treaties can be written with vague wording to allow parties to sign it, even if there isn't 100% agreement. That's an old practice.
- sixo 3y ago
  It is probably better to be intentionally and clearly unclear when you want to be, and clearly algorithmic when you want that, than just stir it all together in the name of judicial discretion.
- Kretinsky 3y ago
  On the contrary, it's much better to have very clear text, otherwise it will turn against the citizen. Imagine that you have an income tax where "income" isn't clearly defined. Someone will end up with an audit and a lawsuit from the tax office because their definition will be, of course, extensive (every income, including non-realized capital gains) whereas most citizens would only consider salaries. In the end, you create legal uncertainty, and give courts way too much power. For the record, I used to work for my country's government, and had to evaluate some laws in making that were written in an abstruse way. When I asked why, the civil servant told me that it was so "they could pick the most favorable meaning in the case of a lawsuit".
  - bjt 3y ago
    It's a balance. If you get too specific then your laws quickly become outdated as technology and society evolve. Or you miss corner cases by not enumerating every little scenario. So there are different tiers to deal with this. - Constitution - Very abstract and very rarely changed. - Statute - Sometimes abstract, sometimes specific. - Administrative rules. Very technical but still intended for broad application. - Individual court cases. Can be hyper specific.

cphoover 3y ago

This is interesting, and not to criticize, but I wonder if transformer model's accuracy in interpreting law will obviate the need for something like this. It would be interesting to train Large Language Transformer Models to generate this code for you based on the text in the laws. This way you have a deterministic testable output, without risk of hallucinations.

0xDEF 3y ago
Even LLMs would be better off with a clear unambiguous syntax to define human laws and rules.

jrm4 3y ago

Lawyer here. Oh, this again. I suppose this looks relatively harmless, but I'm always wary of "law is like computer code." The impulse to think this can strongly solve any real problem in the law is intuitively attractive, but I strongly predict this mostly never happens; it's the law's job to be intensely practical in the face of hard-edged "computer-like" rules. If anything, you get goofy confusion about what things "are?" My go-to on this is always the "smart contract" -- which can be useful little bits of automated robot money moving code, but emphatically are neither "smart" nor "contracts."

diogenes4 3y ago
> If anything, you get goofy confusion about what things "are?" My go-to on this is always the "smart contract" -- which can be useful little bits of automated robot money moving code, but emphatically are neither "smart" nor "contracts." They are contracts—just not legal contracts. One of many types of contracts in the world that are not legal constructs.
- Angostura 3y ago
  Most contracts are intended to be enforceable by law, as far as I know. Which kind of non-enforceable contracts did you have in mind?
  - layer8 3y ago
    Software-interface contracts generally aren’t (cf. Design by Contract). The parent is correct insofar as the use of the word “contract” is not limited to contracts as defined by law.
    - jrm4 3y ago
      Right, I mean, I've heard this use and I think it's kind of silly. It's like calling a hopefully-completed-circuit in some device an "electric contract" or something like that.

version_five 3y ago

What problem does this solve? It appears to add precision where it's mostly already clear - perhaps it can enforce some kind of rigor... but then like the example given uses "fair market value" as a term which I'd expect to be the kind of thing that's in contention, rather than any of the actual "logic", and it doesn't help with that. The reason we have courts and lawyers is because of the need for interpretation beyond just writing good logic, so I don't see how this can really do anything. Or is it for something else?

parineum 3y ago
>It appears to add precision where it's mostly already clear - perhaps it can enforce some kind of rigor... I'd argue that the imprecision of law is more feature than bug. Rules as written have edge cases and, as long as the law is written in natural language, you can get a feel for their intent and that helps Judges decide what to do in those situations.
0thgen 3y ago
I suppose a formalized legal language could: - help in quickly testing whether newly drafted laws contradict existing laws(without needing to memorize the existing legal code) - check for redundancies - checking whether removing one law affects any others - statistically analyze legal systems in different countries Assuming any of those are important issues in law. I'm not sure
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
Catala still produces plaintext legal documents at the end of the day but can be seen as a markup language for those documents. But because that markup language is a whole lot more precise than the legal text itself, it can be a bit more versatile. Examples of how this could be useful: - Reducing the overhead for maintaining a list of semantic translations of that legal code into other languages. Of course the official language is the only one that is "legal" but the other translations should be close enough to effectively express the nuance provided the language outputs are maintained by people who can actually speak those languages. - Producing machine executable proof or simulation code. This could be used for "fuzzing" the legal code to identify loopholes or unintended outcomes so that legislators can then propose improved terms to avoid those issues. This is by no means "making code law" but it provides an additional tool for understanding the law and how the many different parts of the legal code interact with each other. - Adding on to the previous example, sim code could be integrated into complex models for simulating the impact of legal changes on the economy at large or specific segments. - Finance related code can be used to generate a tool or API for validating tax, accounting, and compliance documents (as a first pass to catch errors early and reduce overhead) as well as to even prepare some of those documents. These tools often already exist but they are one or more steps removed from the actual legal definition which increases the risk of error as well as the overhead of maintaining them (which can potentially encourage rent seeking behavior by commercial providers of these tools). France actually is already doing this to a reasonable degree albeit the "codified" version is based on the law rather than the codified version producing plaintext law. The DGFiP [1] maintains a gitlab organisation [2] that includes both Catala and MLang [3] representations of different parts of the french legal code for exactly these purposes. 1. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_des_Finances_publiques https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_d... 2. https://gitlab.adullact.net/dgfip https://gitlab.adullact.net/dgfip 3. https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang

simplify 3y ago

Also see Logical English, a "Programming Language for Law and Ethics" https://virtuale.unibo.it/pluginfile.php/1273247/mod_unibores/content/0/Logical%20English%20for%20Law%20and%20Ethics_new2.pdf https://virtuale.unibo.it/pluginfile.php/1273247/mod_unibore...

blagund 3y ago

My hunch is, in any sufficiently large rule set, there will be inconsistencies. Handwaily think Gödel, or just the need for bounded domains in DDD. Humans (or, well, AI) is needed to cope with inconsistencies. That said, pointing out the fact of existence of inconsistencies could be very valuable. But a system needs to embrace them, not fight them.

drdeca 3y ago
Gödel’s theorems don’t imply inconsistency for all large systems (unless “large” is taken to mean something strange), just for systems which are both not super-weak in what they can say, and complete (or if they have their own consistency as a theorem). I don’t think Gödel’s theorems particularly support the claim you’re making. In fact, here is an argument that a consistent rule-set (either can be extended to something consistent and complete, or ) can be extended to be made arbitrarily large and consistent: take a ruleset which is consistent, but for which there is something for which it has no prescription one way or the other (neither explicitly nor implied collectively by other rules) (I.e. “not complete”). Then, add a rule specifying that thing and nothing else which isn’t implied by that thing. This will be consistent, as if it were not, then the negation of the rule added would have already been an implication. This will either yield a larger ruleset of the same kind (consistent and incomplete), or it will yield one which is consistent and complete. Gödel’s theorems show that if the ruleset is an axiom system which is sufficiently expressive (e.g. contains Peano arithmetic) then the latter cannot be the result. So in this case, there are arbitrarily large extensions of the rule-set. If it isn’t an axiom system, or is one for a rather weak system, then the “the result is a consistent and complete system” option, well, why would you want it to be larger? Edit: perhaps what you are calling “inconsistencies” are what I would just call “exceptions”/“exceptional cases”? To my mind, “embracing an inconsistency” doesn’t seem to make much sense in the case of law? Something has to be what actually happens. We (whether fortunately or unfortunately) cannot bring an actual contradiction into reality. Well, I suppose if one takes a sub-truth(not sure if this is the right terminology? I mean the opposite of super-truth) approach to vague statements, one might say that a somewhat-bald man causes the statement “that man is bald, and also that man is not bald” to be true (and also false), and as such “bring a contradiction into reality”, but that’s not what I mean by the phrase. I mean there is no full precise-ification of any statement, which we can cause to be simultaneously true and false irl. Those acting as agents of the law must behave in some particular way. When legal requirements contradict, people will not satisfy both of them. Perhaps one will be considered to take priority. Perhaps a compromise position between the requirements will be sought. Perhaps it will be left to the judgement of those following it in a case-by-case basis. But in none of these cases is a contradiction implemented. Can they really be said to be embracing the contradiction? Upon writing this edit I realize that I’m probably misinterpreting that part of your comment. I suppose the thing you are saying to embrace is not the individual contradictions themselves, so much as the system’s rules-as-written having contradictions, and therefore the necessity of dealing with such contradictions when implementing the rules, as the scenarios to which the contradictory statements apply, occur.

EPWN3D 3y ago

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.

btilly 3y ago
I think you meant, "...humans, lawyers, and bribes." No, I don't have a lot of faith in our legal system. Why do you ask?
- post-it 3y ago
  Sure, but this new language wouldn't help with that.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Absolutely. Although the clarity by creating algorithms from tax tables can be helpful, and sometimes the wording seems ambiguous. Although you probably also need lots and lots of examples. (It is as if you need unit tests!)
- barryrandall 3y ago
  Most tax-related rules in the US are specified in an XML-based business rules language. That's partly how tax prep companies are able to get rules that don't finalize until 12/31 into products that have to ship 6 weeks later.
Jeff_Brown 3y ago
+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?
- ChoHag 3y ago
  [dead]

WanderPanda 3y ago

Would be so funny if all the compute moves from AI to finding loopholes in the programmatically defined law.

gorenb 3y ago
"haha! actually, if you give it this input, the program crashes! i can finally steal pillows from the bookstore!"

kstrauser 3y ago

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 than that. I called the sponsor of the bill and asked if that meant if my hypothetical daughter sent a naked picture of herself to her boyfriend, then wouldn't she be a felon under his new law? He had an "oh, crap, that's not what I meant!" reaction and ended up withdrawing the bill so it could be re-written. (Aside: I felt pretty good about that. Props to the legislator for being quick to understand and respond appropriately!) Imagine if that were handled like program code, with a test like: * This law does not apply to minors sending pictures of themselves. That would do a few big things: It would make legislators be clear about what they mean. "Oh, we'd never use this online child safety law to ban pro-trans content from the Internet!" "Great! Let's add that as a test case then." I confess that this is a deal breaker: politicians don't like being pinned down like that. It would probably make it easier to write laws that reflect those intentions. "Hey, that law as written would apply to a 15 year old sexting her boyfriend! The code doesn't pass the tests." Future courts could use that to evaluate a law's intent. "The wording says it applies to 15 year olds sending selfies, but the tests are explicit that it wasn't meant to. Not guilty." I'm sure this couldn't happen for a hundred reasons, but I can dream.

jrm4 3y ago
I partly like this idea in theory, but believe it is literally 100% impossible to come up with a better "test suite" than "the actual court system?"
- kstrauser 3y ago
  The courts have to evaluate what they think the law's drafters meant: Yeah, it says this, but it's obvious the legislators didn't mean for it to be read that way. It'd be nice if there were footnotes that expounded on what the authors were trying to accomplish to help courts interpret the laws.

29athrowaway 3y ago

I think having a "linter" for laws can be beneficial. It can help producing laws that are easier to read and understand. Having a "compiler" for laws can help identifying conflicts between different codes of law. e.g.: Imagine having a compiler error when a law is unconstitutional from a logical standpoint. But verifying the "business logic" (e.g.: what is the spirit or intent of the law?) of the law will remain a human intelligence task.

t2b1 3y ago

Completely unrelated to Catalan (Català), the language spoken in Catalonia (Catalunya). I think if someone wants to google a question about this, "catala language beginner hello world" won't help them much.

deleted 3y ago
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medstrom 3y ago
I can only conclude that they didn't know that. It's such a bad name; we won't even be able to google "catala lang" because ... Catala is also a "lang"! Imagine someone creates a programming language called Russian. Good luck googling "russian lang".
- _visgean 3y ago
  given that the major contributors seems to be from paris / bordeaux i am pretty sure they know about catalan.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > given that the major contributors seems to be from paris / bordeaux i am pretty sure they know about catalan. Yes, but did they know that català is Catalan for Catalan? In French, as in English, it is catalan instead (well, English always capitalises it, French doesn't, but the spelling is identical).
hiq 3y ago
You'd write "catalalang" just like you write "golang", if you really need. I think in most context, search engines would be able to infer the context.
- gilcot 3y ago
  Smart…
deleted 3y ago

chillbill 3y ago

[dead]

kderbyma 3y ago

Started something like this years ago with a company that ended up pivoting to a slightly different direction after a while. glad to see something in open source space.

qaq 3y ago

Naming is hard Catala is cardsharper (cheat) in russian.

juunpp 3y ago
Catala is also a human language.

turtleyacht 3y ago

It would be interesting to also "weave" in test cases. The workface of logic statements is exactly where bugs are introduced. Especially around temporal events, and that goes to formal models (and even more bugs). Typically, if there is a rule around height, there would be at least three tests¹: one taller, one equal to, and one shorter. (Without types or something, then also negative, null, and max/min boundary inputs too.) So you could have tests based on timelines, like Given a regulation is passed in 3 months And parties are prevented from exercising B But "17 tons" of waste are dumped anyway And ... When ... Then ... Having a model checker integrated would be a boon. Maybe we could have DevOps-like pipelines in formally-verified legislature (or at least the encoding of language to code). ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_partitioning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_partitioning

natn 3y ago
imagine... TTD applied to laws. Or take it a step further, write a test suite and automatically generate a range of possible laws that satisfy the tests.
octacat 3y ago
It will not compile (sarcasm). Many laws are written with a lot of double meaning (recent eu regulations on allowing or not allowing russian cars is a good example). Though, it could be a good idea to find all the possible double meanings or vague definition when trying to "digitise" the laws into the programming language.
- ragulpr 3y ago
  Right, some laws are just ftp-dragged & dropped to prod, understanding that it doesn't compile yet. But if legislator managed to express the _intention_ the courts will over time add and make all test cases pass. I'm sure the mentality of a PHP developer running a successful but insane legacy site is a better model for this than a perfect OCAML project :)
az09mugen 3y ago
That would be nice also to have unit tests

greybox 3y ago

I'd be interested in seeing something like this for verifying game designs / new game rules given an existing design

GolDDranks 3y ago
Why? What do game designs have to do with law?
- 0x9b 3y ago
  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.
  - altair8800 3y ago
    Wouldn’t that just be writing test cases against the business logic of your game?
    - Martinussen 3y ago
      I assume they're talking about tabletop/board games and such, not video games.
      - GolDDranks 3y ago
        Ahh, that was the context I was missing. Indeed, makes sense for board games.

RedNifre 3y ago

Will it help? On the one hand, I think it would be fantastic, if you had automated tests for the law. For example, when German politicians introduced the "hacker law", you could have pointed out that "This new law would break the 'security researchers need to be allowed to do penetration testing' test". On the other hand, "Brexit is in conflict with the Good Friday Agreement, we need a solution for Nothern Ireland." was known without machine readable laws and test, but politicians ignored it anyway. Maybe what's needed is a law that outlaws test-breaking laws and requires politicians to fix the tests first, but I bet that would just result in a lot of "commented" tests.

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staunton 3y ago
If you make a law against "test-breaking" people will just break that law.

gandalfgeek 3y ago

(self plug) They published a paper describing the language https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939, and here's a short video summary of it: https://youtu.be/OiaFTFSAa1I https://youtu.be/OiaFTFSAa1I

thargor90 3y ago

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

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mdaniel 3y ago
linky-linky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic an example of the game rules: https://agoranomic.org/ruleset/slr.txt 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

dazzaji 3y ago

I’m really interested in this project as another way to computationally express and use law. For more color on the project, here is a demo and discussion “Idea Flow” session I did with the project leads: https://law.mit.edu/pub/ideaflow8 https://law.mit.edu/pub/ideaflow8

lockedinspace 3y ago

Thought this was realated to the Catalan western romance language. Naming could confuse some Spanish and French users.

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gield 3y ago
Don't forget about the Andorran users!

dang 3y ago

Related: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24948342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24948342 - Oct 2020 (37 comments)

eddtests 3y ago

This is really cool! But I guess it’s biggest drawback is being unable to deal with case law?

cpeterso 3y ago

Interesting that their “money” type doesn’t allow fractional cents or track the currency. And the only collection type is a fixed-sized list. I can imagine a lot of other useful base types that would be useful for laws about the real world, such as physical units like meters. https://catala-lang.org/en/examples/tutorial#The%20Catala%20language%20tutorial-Catala%20values https://catala-lang.org/en/examples/tutorial#The%20Catala%20...

codedokode 3y ago

Laws are often written in most vague language to allow wide interpretation, especially laws regarding treason, communism, foreign agents, anti-war speeches and such things. Programming language won't help here.

anticristi 3y ago
I'm also somewhat skeptical. How would a program deduce that "cookies and similar technologies" will mean localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB, etc. Remember that the law was written well before some of these technologies even existed.

yieldcrv 3y ago

without formal training, one key thing I picked up is that most public understanding of legal concepts diverges from court understanding because law follows logical and/or gates so “and” isnt a list of accepted criteria, it is a list of things that must be simultaneously satisfied but its only using logical gates most of the time this is a good step in showing that. not a panacea but a good step!

jeppester 3y ago

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 believe it would greatly improve everyone's ability to read laws and be confident about their understanding of them, which would be a huge boon for society.

swayvil 3y ago
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.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Am actually working on a project like this. Not quite to the level of insanity you're thinking about, but certainly a couple of thousand years.
- willsoon 3y ago
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- jll29 3y ago
  Former R&D director of legaltech company here. Lawyers already use tools that link everything. For instance in the U.S., the Westlaw search engine for legal cases is such a tool, it can parse legal citations and turns them into hyperlinks. It rankes cases given a query based on a state-of-the art machine learning based IR method, and it is aware of cases in the ranking that are currently overturned by higher courts (shown as red flags) or being reviewed (shown as yellow flags). The software can also predict the outcome of a legal case and recommend courses of action that makes winning more likely. It includes ruling statistics about all sitting judges. Curiously, lawyers like to see the world as static, they do not like e.g. search results to differ between sessions, but of course cases get decided dynamically every day, which must necessarily also change the search results for any given query. If people want to see what is the state of the art in AI and the law, I recommend you have a look at "AI & the Law" (ICAIL, the annual conference and the journal of the same name).

lightedman 3y ago

No way would this ever be a good idea. Language changes too much, be it human or machine. This is why you need flexibility, not a rigid structure, in making law.

EdwardCoffin 3y ago

Something like this got passing mention in Greg Bear's [1] book Moving Mars (1993) [2], under the name Legal Logic. The (human) Martians used it with AI assistance to formulate legislation for their newly independent society. For those who don't know, Greg Bear was a well-known SF author who died less than a year ago. His passing was discussed here at the time [3] [4]. He was one of the authors that influenced my youth a great deal, and I particularly remember this aspect of Moving Mars as catching my imagination, so will be interested to read what Catala has to offer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Mars [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679668 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675708

nologic01 3y ago

This seems like a worthy project but I think its landing page should define the scope of what it aims to do in more concrete terms. Otherwise it runs the risk of being seen as overambitious and open ended without a concrete problem to solve. E.g. its not clear if there is an explicit or implicit ontology against which the validity of any codification can be checked.

sesm 3y ago

This project is doing code -> text, right? But then, the first line of description in Github says: > Catala is a domain-specific language for deriving faithful-by-construction algorithms from legislative texts. This reads like 'text -> code', which is the opposite of what this project seems to be doing.

ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago

As someone who speaks Catalan, I find the name collision with the language referred to in the article most unfortunate.

andrewnicolalde 3y ago
Why unfortunate? Also, I love your username. I think many of us could have guessed that you spoke Catalan from that alone ;).
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
  Makes it quite difficult to search for it, both being "language" "Catal{a,à}".

swayvil 3y ago

A software for people. For dictating human behavior. Is that what we're looking at here?

wcerfgba 3y ago

What are the authors' goals, what is their intended purpose? I can't find a mission statement on their website.

slazaro 3y ago

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 potential problems for yourselves when you can choose a name that's not an issue?

mrdoob2 3y ago
Came here to share the same thought.
mathisfun123 3y ago
goofy; the language you're talking about is Catalan of Catalonia, not `catala`. > Just googling things about it is going to be hard when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"? edit: fine, it's called catalá in catalonian itself - this is so pedantic now that i might as well at this point say that the missing diacritic is sufficient to disambiguate.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  Catalá is the name of the language in Catalan, is totally equivalent to saying "English" if you are a native. This is obviously a not innocent choice. At this level I don't believe in coincidences and CatalaLang makes it even more obvious. This looks like a veeeery obvious psy-op, or a independentist version of the old embrace, extend, extinguish. My bet is that as they can't stomach the basic legal concepts, they will try silently replace it by the new "updated" meaning of those concepts.
  - feliixh 3y ago
    Def a psyop. Classic Catalonian move of seizing independence by writing self determination laws in code and carefully introducing a bug that they can then exploit to secede.
- 3y ago

pvaldes 3y ago

"We" will interpret the law for you and the judges, and "we" are not suspicious at all of having a hidden agenda to replace "the law" by "how we see the law" to benefit ourselves. Is this a joke?

llsf 3y ago

Can we use it to compute taxes ?

dathinab 3y ago

programmers love to propose using "programming language" or similar for law But this fails to realize that _ambiguity (in some ways) is a fundamental important part of law_. This is because the world itself is fundamental ambiguous (in some ways)/clear cut. Naturally not all ways of ambiguity are wanted. But you can be sure that with "code as law" the ways loopholes are abused will get worse in my opinion. I would even go as far that some many laws should be more focused on what should be upheld then the details how (which is fundamental less clear cut/more ambiguous).

unethical_ban 3y ago
Agreed. Although I don't think this is a bad idea, I think of the idea of perfectly defined laws and perfectly enforceable laws are terrifying. If every law on the books today were able to be perfectly enforced and perfectly monitored, our lives would be utterly miserable. I'm not going to argue that's a problem with laws vs. enforcement, but either way, our society is built around ambiguity and unequal enforcement of law.
- dathinab 3y ago
  I'm not speaking about perfect enforcement. But about that law, in difference to what movies love to pretend, is not about clever word tricks and nit-picking formulations. (In court it still can be about clever arguing, including nit picking arguments if necessary.) But code _is_ about nit picking formulations at least if we ignore documentation, naming conventions etc. but lock solely at what the code does. Code is meant to be precise. Law is meant to be only as precise as necessary but no more then that. Or you could say it's meant to be as imprecise as viable. Code is about the specific case (in general). Law is about the generic case (in general), avoiding specific cases where possible. Code is made for machines to consume. Law is meant to be consumed with ambiguous defined context of the situations in (human) . This is so deeply rooted in law that I would argue it's (in general, with exceptions) not possible to translate any current laws to code without accidentally changing their meaning in a lot of subtle but meaningful cases.
- brutusborn 3y ago

roguesupport 3y ago

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unstyledcontent 3y ago

Something to keep in mind is that the courts are not necessarily trying to determine the truth, but rather create a place to allow two parties that represent different interests duke it out. Not always what the courts are used for, but it's a different mentality than science or programming.

rsrsrs86 3y ago

I had so much trouble getting catala to even compile that I got frustrated. It’s a piece of academic code that’s very much abandoned

a-priori 3y ago
It's hardly abandoned. The git history shows activity almost every day over the last few months. It's clearly being actively developed.

Layvier 3y ago

Super interesting. I also think we would win with a kind of versioning system for laws, including a definite objective for a law from the time of it's creation, and constraints under which it should be questioned again

gmfawcett 3y ago

I was expecting Lojban, or something similar. I remember someone proposing Lojban as a tool that could improve the clarity of legal and contractual writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

ftxbro 3y ago

this is peak hacker news 'solve human conflict by using technology'

klysm 3y ago

Doesn’t TurboTax have some kind of DSL they use to encode all of the tax rules?

friend_and_foe 3y ago

That's really cool! I was puttering around with the idea of a ricardian compiler for legalese, basically a decompiler for something like this that could compile a legal text into clear logical rules. This would aid in proof checking for legal documents to ensure that they're compatible with existing law, that there are no (unintended lol) loopholes and the like. It would also be useful if you wanted to create self enforcing legal documents that can be enforced deterministically by machines, such as collateralized agreements, and finally, even though someone would still need to know legalese, it could make the development of such agreements easier for people and lower the bar tremendously. I wonder if anyone has built anything like that, if these guys have, or if anyone has built other interesting ricardian compilers.

p-e-w 3y ago

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 present no arguments supporting the same.

steego 3y ago
I suspect the motivation of this project is a lot more practical than what you’re projecting onto it, and I suspect you might be discounting how often law is transformed into code that runs on state IT systems. 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.
- wiz21c 3y ago
  It is hugely useful. I worked on implementation of law in code for 10 years and the big problem is this: there's a constant communication between software devs and law poeple. For exmaple "did you code this like that ?", "why did the system did that ?", "if I code this way, does it reflect the law precisely ?". You have to constantly trnaslate from the code base to the language of lawyers and vice versa. Doing that with regular code is no good: regular code ends up mixing law code and technical code. Making a clear separation with a dedicated language is a big plus.
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anon291 3y ago
Some laws, like tax bracket computation probably are fine but most laws should not be codified like this in my opinion
- 3y ago

gorgoiler 3y ago

Laws would do well to follow the rules of software. Small modules with clear responsibilities with an emphasis on readability and test cases that are run before you go to prod, for example. Testing is expensive so I understand why the legal system would rather just push their code and fix bugs when they see them in the wild. The collateral damage for people caught up in real life test cases is tolerable, especially when it’s someone else footing the bill. 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.

p0w3n3d 3y ago
Moreover I think laws work similarly to software. People wrote law, others find a loophole and use it, the people fix it with patches, and so on...

alexvitkov 3y ago

Although I agree on principle, the closest thing we have to 'formal law' are smart contracts, and already billions of dollars have been stolen from bugs in these, despite barely anyone using them. I have some reservations for basing our entire legal system on code.

krsdcbl 3y ago
I think that comparison is way off. Smart contracts are much more comparable to "a webshop", than actual logic describing rules of arbitrage or other concepts at play in "law".
- alexvitkov 3y ago
  A smart contract is a well-defined series of rules, that anyone can choose to interact with and have certain well-specified guarentees of the outcome -- in that sense I think there are quite a few similarities, the main differences being that a smart contract deals with a way narrower set of concepts and is immutable.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    Part of the problem with smart contracts is the term usually means Ethereum programs, which are usually neither good law nor good programming. They're not only playing a game with high stakes but the actual programming environment is a textbook case of how not to do computing. You can't generalize much from the experience there, it'd be like judging all of computing by looking at piles of PHP written by drug-addled teenagers.

PeterStuer 3y ago

Ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. I used to spend a lott of time on business process automation, and even in those more structured and restricted settings trying to codify procedures most often fails. The reason is that reality has (a) so many edge cases that it very rapidly devolves into chasing down an ever diminishing ROI, (b) is unknown by the middle management and business analists, those that would have the authority to construct and sign off on it, and (c) relies on intelligent people applying creative pragmatic solutions to keep the business running and straightjacketing those into inflexible automatons is the most surefire way to sink the ship.

ctenb 3y ago

I would have a much easier time understanding government legislation if everything was provided in such language. I tried to compute my taxes by hand a month ago to see whether and how much money it would save if I enabled "loon middeling" (some Dutch law about income). But I couldn't figure it out. The explanations provided were ambgiuous in some subtle way, leading me to incorrect assumptions. In the end I did figure it out by reverse engineering a free third party calculation tool (which also was not correct, but putting their insight and my insight together made something that came close to the number on my belastingaanslag).

tanukiworld 3y ago

I'm actually in court later this month pertaining to some stolen traffic cones. Dismissed my lawyer just yesterday due to a dishonest swagger. I'll be preparing some documents using this after I prototype using a few frameworks. Will keep you posted.

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otikik 3y ago

The naming choice is really unfortunate. It's like naming a programming language "français", or "Deutsch" (or "English"). From the bottom of the readme: > The language is named after Pierre Catala I'd suggest changing it to PierreLang then.

bibanez 3y ago
"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." As a native Catalan speaker I was quite surprised with the name! But it makes sense, since it's quite a common surname!

ChristopherDrum 3y ago

This paper definitely has thoughts on the matter https://law.mit.edu/pub/interpretingtherulesofcode/release/4 https://law.mit.edu/pub/interpretingtherulesofcode/release/4 "As the Rules as Code movement gains momentum, questions are starting to be asked about the performance and practical effects of expressing law computationally. This article examines the strengths, weaknesses, and new opportunities of engaging with these emerging systems." The Future of Coding podcast covered it recently https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/065 https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/065 The abstract says, "Software code is built on rules. The way it enforces them is analogous in certain ways to the philosophical notion of legalism, under which citizens are expected to follow legal rules without thinking too hard about their meaning or consequences. By analogy, the opacity, immutability, immediacy, pervasiveness, private production, and ‘ruleishness’ of code amplify its ‘legalistic’ nature far beyond what could ever be imposed in the legal domain, however, raising significant questions about its legitimacy as a regulator." It's a complex paper/topic that I personally need more time to grasp before throwing my opinions around too heavily. But my first, knee-jerk reaction so far is that moving laws into code is a bad idea. Specifically, as the paper says, "...code by its very nature tends toward a kind of strong legalism. This is the case regardless of the intent of the programmer, however vicious or virtuous that may be." The "strong legalism" inherent in code means "the sovereign’s exercise of power is de facto legitimate, and thus not open to question." Not to be reductive, but that ain't good. I feel we've seen evidence of this path already, with (easily refuted, but somewhat common) claims like "data can't be biased" (for example). The tendency to blindly follow a computer's dictate with, "Well, the computer says this is so, so it must be so." is strong in our society at times, I think.

amluto 3y ago

Law is a mess, in part because its authors take shortcuts. For example, from the first example on CatalaLang's README.md: > If the property was acquired by gift [and various conditions apply], then for the purpose of determining loss the basis shall be such fair market value. [emphasis added] I think (and I'm not a lawyer or a tax expert) that this means that the basis of an asset can have a different value for the purpose of determining gain or determining loss. Wow, basis isn't just a number, although one might not notice this if one didn't read the six emphasized words. But the Catala code seems to completely ignore this. Oops. I filed an issue: https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala/issues/514 https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala/issues/514 In a real use case, I imagine that substantial refactoring of the parts that consume basis might be needed when one notices that the basis is not a number.

crabbone 3y ago

If anything, I'm grateful to this article for exposing me to this Bill Gates deposition. I had no idea he was so repugnant and incompetent liar. Sometimes, in my mind, I'm trying to justify the clearly bad actions by big corporations by saying something like "maybe they don't know" or "maybe they are in a tight spot between many bad choices", but here it's loud and clear that it was deliberate. He and his buddies knew what they were doing, they knew it was wrong and they didn't care. Neither had he the guts to own up to his wrongdoing.