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Comment by jelling | Hacker News Reader

Knowing how to code prepares you to deal with lawyers that say something is complex but then you verbally break it down into an if-elseif-else in 5m and they get flummoxed. And when you find a possible bug / loop-hole / fuzziness, they tell you they will need weeks to research it on your dime when it has all the complexity of a stack overflow post.

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It's not always (or even usually) cluelessness or malice. Law is somewhat like code, except it's like the worst Aspect-Oriented Programming codebase you can imagine - the source in front of you is never the full story. They may need the extra time just to go through possible interactions with codes, precedents, official interpretations, etc.

I once had the lovely task of turning law into code. 3 lawyers, 4 different judges, 3 officers/officials, and dozens of people the code applied to. The amount of 'law' was maybe 10 sentences. But there were books written on how to apply that small bit of law. That set was pretty solid and had 40 years of 'know how that works case law'. Then it got thrown out in court. Total rewrite. Same set of people again. But many had no idea how to even begin to apply that new law. It took nearly 2 years of wrangling with different law organizations to find out how is this going to be applied. It got so bad I was finding bugs in the law and loopholes just because I threw my hands up and exhaustively searched the whole space of actions. Even the guy who had the fun task of writing the law had reservations. I think they fixed the 'bugs' in a new rewrite a few years ago after it got thrown out again in court. Luckily I was out by that point.

Hm, maybe in some instances. But since laws involve humans and the laws are intentionally not always mathematically clear and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts, I would be careful to generalize here.

> and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts

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.

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