Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me.
So transitioning from law to coding is maybe "just" learning some programming language and technical details, but the mind is already somewhat prepared to the thinking?
If you are a certain type of lawyer, then law and coding are a natural fit. There are several different types of lawyers. Some like the code aspect of law (literally, the legal code), some like the more social aspects of lawyering -- like negotiating deals and trying to bullshit the answer when you are about to lose your case and networking and just all around helping people out.
My wife is a lawyer. My brother was a lawyer. My wife's brother is a lawyer. Of those three, my brother would not have been a very good programmer, and my wife's brother would rather launch himself into the sun. My wife would be good at it (and she is; I have taught her a little to work on our own family web project), but she is also a good mathematician and good scientist, so it's hard to say how much of it might be from legal training.
It's also a ton of rote memorization, which luckily isn't very important for programming because I'm terrible at it.
Students that had an analytical perspective (e.g. from supply chain debugging) typically excelled.
Students from more fuzzy, language-based perspectives (e.g. marketing) had a lot more difficulty.
The theory was that programming has many arbitrary rules that you need to be aware of work your way around to make things work, why is the language construct like this instead of this other way etc.
The law in many ways is logical but it is an arbitrary logic.
It may be the reason it’s hard to find now is that Bornat later retracted it, blaming his struggles with mental health. [0]
0. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...
I think it is that, although it doesn't match exactly what I remember either.
I wonder what Saeed Dehnadi says about it though.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...
I think there is another benefit - in that if you have some legal background (not much needed, some business law courses and basic familiarity) then when you are looking at code that you can't figure out why did they do this and think I will improve it! Sometimes the reason they did things in a weird way is because of regulatory requirements and you might be better able to notice those situations.
Also when you are planning features you might be able to determine this needs to be ran past legal more than other developers (at least I've had this experience a few times)
Could work in reverse too. I met the author Ken Liu at a convention, and he mentioned he started out as a software engineer, and then went to law school. And then began writing on the side as well.
By the way, I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math, comp sci and minoring in music)
My favorite interview question is to take something the interviewee doesn't know, toss a laptop in front of them, and ask them to see if they can find an answer. You learn a lot about a person from the way they search.
I personally minored in music composition (with a masters in CS) but I wouldn't describe myself as a liberal arts grad.
And the entire ethos of my school was about internationalism and utopian thinking, certainly not about doing real world practical things or even making money.
So liberal arts graduate is still accurate for me.
it's run time interpretation vs compiled, and the interpreters vary wildly with respect to speed and how they were built. running a scenario through one court may not give you the same output as another, and may not even give you the same output 6 months later as it did previously.