denismerigoux

8 ms·

1.
by denismerigoux 5y ago
Catala is not meant to formalize a law which obviously was not written to "compute" something. It is meant as a tool to improve the fair and just enforcement of pieces of law that effectively define an algorithm that can be enforc
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by denismerigoux 5y ago
Yeah this seems boring and uninteresting but you might be surprised to hear that large organizations struggle a lot to get those things right: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2020/01/...
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by denismerigoux 5y ago
It is actually a purely functional language : the compiler translates all the code to lambda calculus at some point ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473582 ).
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by denismerigoux 5y ago
Thanks for pointing out the broken link, I just fixed it : https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala-website/commit/a5c4157a... . Your question is spot-on; for me the Catala code has to be officially published from
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by denismerigoux 5y ago
I've considered it, but from interactions with lawyers it seems that you don't need to put that degree of sophistication into the syntax for lawyers to be able to read and review the code. Turns out semantic features like the poss
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by denismerigoux 5y ago
No, the language does not have self reflection, it is a domain specific language that is not even Turing complete. However Catala programs could be compiled to deep or shallow embeddings inside other programming languages, including inside
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by denismerigoux 5y ago
Hi, Catala author here. This is amazing! Please get in touch if you have any questions or just want to talk :)
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by denismerigoux 5y ago
Hi, Catala author here! (2) is definitely possible since the language has a formalization and is proof-oriented. I have plans to connect it to theorem provers for the kind of application you're referring to, just didn't have the t
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
Very insightful update, I'll remember it. Thanks!
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
Hi, OP here :) I've come to the same conclusion about programming language creation. However, for a very large organization, it makes sense to have a team in charge of language tooling (see Dropbox/Python, Facebook/Hack/
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
Hi, author here :) You seem to be well-informed of the DGFiP jargon, do you know if news of my work has been spreading among the IT department there?
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
It helps the State and private organizations to comply with the law when computing income tax, payroll taxes, etc. There's a huge gap between the law and how it is applied in some situations https://twitter.com/DMerigou
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
Hi, Catala author here :) Since I'm here please shoot your questions, I'll try to answer them.
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
Yes it could, although I'm not sure there is a single Prolog system running in production inside a large government agency at the moment. Also Prolog does not solve all the problems related to programming the law, especially it doesn&#
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
Hi, Catala author here :) Totally, tax law is usually the most precisely written. But it's still ambiguous as Sarah Lawsky points out https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2987065
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
Hi, Catala author here :) I totally agree that law should be readable and the Norwegian initiative seems great ! However at least in France we're stuck with the law he have and while some are rightfully proposing some simplification (
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by denismerigoux 6y ago
It's already been tried : http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2143/paper9.pdf . In a nutshell : NLP techniques don't work so well on the text of law, because it's too messy.