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erm no its a very speclised form of document - I wish programmers who have no experience of how laws are made and parliamentary procedure would stop making broa

erm no its a very speclised form of document - I wish programmers who have no experience of how laws are made and parliamentary procedure would stop making broad assumptions like this. Any thing using a parliamentry system to draft laws has a lot of fuzy areas and some non obvious gotchas. I while back i had a whole day being briefed on the new employment laws one of my collegues asked well why did they not draft the wording so its clear exactly when you are allowed to discriminate on age grounds. The General Counsel who was leading the course gave a wry grin and said well there are lots of lawyers in the House of commons so maybe they wanted to create loads of work for there lawyer friends

icebraining 15y ago
I don't know why have you brought up draft laws. Parents said "legal documents," of which only a minuscule number are laws. Most are contracts, licenses, agreements, deeds, etc.
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  Which have a law that underpins them - I was talking about the more general case/
guard-of-terra 15y ago
I failed to parse your response, but it doesn't seem to address the points I made. Any program text itself is a "very specialised form of document".
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  no that's just the high level representation of the program I was commenting the tendency of non political tecies (who are not wonks) to make a very superficial link between using a SCS to commit code and how government and in how particular laws are made.
tow21 15y ago
Well, as a programmer * whose father is an academic lawyer * who has actually developed software for drafting and reviewing legal documents within parliamentary procedure I can tell you that all the above is entirely true. In any case, the vast majority of legal documents in everyday use aren't developed in a parliamentary system, they're developed within the framework of contract law, where sensible refactoring and variable naming would go a very long way if lawyers had the tooling and training to make use of them.

icebraining 15y ago

I don't know why have you brought up draft laws. Parents said "legal documents," of which only a minuscule number are laws. Most are contracts, licenses, agreements, deeds, etc.

mjwalshe 15y ago
Which have a law that underpins them - I was talking about the more general case/

guard-of-terra 15y ago

I failed to parse your response, but it doesn't seem to address the points I made. Any program text itself is a "very specialised form of document".

mjwalshe 15y ago
no that's just the high level representation of the program I was commenting the tendency of non political tecies (who are not wonks) to make a very superficial link between using a SCS to commit code and how government and in how particular laws are made.

tow21 15y ago

Well, as a programmer * whose father is an academic lawyer * who has actually developed software for drafting and reviewing legal documents within parliamentary procedure I can tell you that all the above is entirely true. In any case, the vast majority of legal documents in everyday use aren't developed in a parliamentary system, they're developed within the framework of contract law, where sensible refactoring and variable naming would go a very long way if lawyers had the tooling and training to make use of them.