Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who wrote the law. Lawmakers should be writing quality laws and fixing problems.
Your code will fail sometimes. You’ll fix it.
In contrast, passing new laws and updating existing laws is (by design) an arduous process in a democracy. There are things that can and should be improved about the ways that we accomplish this, but it will never be (and really shouldn’t be) fast and easy.
Sometimes I just want to ignore HN entirely because of embarrassing comments like this. “Code works this way, so everything should work this way!”
I never said the law worked exactly like code. I used your code metaphor to explain my point in language you might understand.
Yet almost everyone fails.
You should also try to write quality laws. But when you fail, do you want the same sort of consequences as with code? How much time, effort, and money has been lost to hacks taking advantage of errors in code?
I would love an interpreter/compiler/processor that knew that I didn't intend to allow a security vulnerability so anyone could escalate their privileges. Sounds great, truly.
Lawmakers shouldn't be focused on bugs in written law, they should be working on new law
Judges aren't the only interpreters of law. They're simply the authoritative ones (ultimately). The law needs to be relatively authoritative so that people can make decisions around it. The whole process is actually a lot messier than such statements and there are usually valid arguments and evidence, but in general we should err on the side of least harm: which means if a law is poorly written, people might get away with something lawmakers wanted to stop. This can, and has, happened, and lawmakers deal with it by updating the law or crafting new ones. (Of course, I also think there is a distinction between the 'intent' of a law and what lawmakers intended and I really only object to basing decisions on the latter.)
Why? Because if an interpreter screws up, we update its code (or ours); but if a person screws up, we throw them in prison or fine them potentially devastating amounts. A person ought to be reasonably secure in acting in accordance with the law.