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Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

What's more interesting is Oracle's lawyer's "rebuttal" to Alsup (according to Groklaw):

  > I'm not an expert on Java -- this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an
  > expert, and I probably couldn't program [rangeCheck] in six months.

I don't know, how can anyone be taken seriously after something like that? He's clearly either stupid or willfully ignorant if he thinks he (a no doubt well-educated and intelligent man) couldn't learn to program rangeCheck in six months.

Yes, I know, of course his defence against this charge will be "I can't be expected to know industry-specific things like this," but then why on Earth are you allowed to regulate and prosecute it?

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Perhaps you classify this as willfully ignorant, but I suspect he has no idea what it is like to program. He also probably assumes that if they're litigating it, it must be important or hard to do. With mental barriers like that, I could see him believing he couldn't do it in six months. But, again, you may consider that the same as willful ignorance.

It's almost certainly willful ignorance. Boies is a very talented litigator and one important skill for a litigator is quickly achieving a fluency in the subject matter of the litigation. Boies has done quite a bit of software work, so he almost certainly gets the gist of what it is like to program.

Boies is indeed well-educated and intelligent - he is one of the best trial lawyers in America. He's being somewhat disingenuous here, on behalf of his client; arguably, you would need to spend 6 months programming before you could look at RangeCheck and know what it does and why you'd want to use it. '6 months' is sort of arbitrary, but suppose your positions were reversed, and you were asked to fill in for David Boies and draft a fairly standard legal motion for submission to the court next week - you'd probably demur and say you'd need time to study legal procedure properly before you would feel confident drafting even a simple motion.

I think Boies is trying a forest-for-trees argument here, hinting that a jury might see the issue quite differently from a judge and that Alsup is discounting the significance of prior expertise and Bloch's existing understanding of Java. It's like one side saying '(something) is so trivial, anyone would have done that without thinking' and the other side saying 'well hold on, that task requires doing ten different things in the right order, and would take even an experienced person several minutes - looks to me like you made a very deliberate choice.' It's not a terribly strong argument, but Boies isn't there to represent himself; he's there to present a view of events most favorable to his client.

why on Earth are you allowed to regulate and prosecute it?

He's litigating it. Big, big difference.

     you would need to spend 6 months programming 
     before you could look at RangeCheck

Except that's sunken cost for education that's paid only once. You also need 12 years to go through high-school and another 3 years to get a BS.

RangeCheck is as trivial as counting your fingers. Counting reliably is learned in the first year of primary school, does that mean that counting isn't trivial because it took a year to learn?

I happen to agree, but as I said it's his job to argue that it's not.

Don't forget nine months for gestation.

I hope Google's response was "First year CS students have to implement more complex functions than rangeCheck on daily quizes within the first week or two."

This is simple - he is lying, but as long as nobody can prove he is, it is fine for him. Lying for the benefit of the client is the thing that lawyers do. Of course he knows it couldn't possible take any intelligent person with basic knowledge in the field six month to write this trivial piece of code. But he is hired to try and prove that Google owes Oracle 2 billion dollars for it. So he wouldn't be a good lawyer if he didn't try to claim it is a big deal. Just as criminal defense attorney would not be a good lawyer if he didn't try to claim his client is not guilty even though privately he would think the client did it. Of course, sometimes it looks hilarious, but in most cases it works, and works very well, judging by how much these people earn.

As a service provider to any industry, it is fundamental that one understand the product. Lawyering is no different but as an attorney it astounds me how many times this is simply ignored.

I believe it is incumbent upon the attorneys to understand the basics of any industry that they are involved with. I first learned BASIC in 1980(?) and have been an amateur ever since and I do believe that has helped me relate to my clients.

BTW, thanks to HN I "learned" Ruby shortly after the posting of a great article on _why.

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