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A Github-esque site is insufficient, and may be unnecessary. What would be necessary is some form of compiler or preprocessor to sort through legislation - and
by PeterWhittaker 12y ago
A Github-esque site is insufficient, and may be unnecessary.
What would be necessary is some form of compiler or preprocessor to sort through legislation - and regulation, unless one has a civil code, e.g., Louisiana or Québec, one need consider regulation, and precedent - and pump out warnings and errors re contradictions, inconsistencies, edge cases, etc.
Yes, there is a degree of "all bugs are shallow" if the legs and regs, etc., are in a system with full histories, diffs, etc., and some form of PR support, but that would be insufficient, given the sheer bulk of the body of law.
This is a major reason why budget bills, e.g., take so long to enact: A simple mandate might be easily stated in a clear, clean, crisp English-language sentence, but now that statement needs to parsed and assessed in the context of hundreds of interrelated legs and regs.
Humans do that now and it is long, dreary labour for well-trained professionals who know how the body of law works and know, to a degree, what can be ignored, left unstated, or need be stated very clearly indeed.
Now we want to add thousands of untrained folk like you and I? Hmm, we'll need a really good compiler, and we'll need a Linus or a Theo or two, semi-benevolent highly-opinionated gatekeepers to manage our promotion from the equivalent of low hanging fruit utilities (minor changes to clearly-defined administrative regulations, e.g.) through to the equivalent of kernel space (major social programs, drug legalization, etc., etc.).
- mike_hearn 12y agoA more formal way to write laws and statically analyse them is a common dream of programmers, me included. But it's unclear how you'd even start to do that. It seems like an AI-hard problem. The Bitcoin community is starting to explore the idea of formalised software contracts, but they're all very basic and it's all very early days.