Yes, in programming, the goal is to communicate clearly to an indifferent interpreter. In legal worlds, the goal is to express the intention while excluding the maximum number of outsiders.
Why else does every coding language provide plain-language comments, but legal documents do not?
In technology, the machine is a stand-in for a human relationship - the cell phone app keeps track of restaurant ratings so people don't have to keep asking one another. The code is a part of the system of distributing the power in the form of information.
In the legal world, the intently obscure language is the means of hoarding and securing the power.
W/r/t to legal systems collapsing, they're protected by guns and myths. The baillifs and police believe Columbus was a hero and they kill to uphold his dream. The incentive to power is enough to entice enough new scholars each year to sustain the illusion.
So to respond to the poster above, the pains of the programmer and legal system are no more similar than the programmer and the chef. Each attempts to communicate a procedure, but the legal system has an entirely different and less noble set of requirements.
> W/r/t to legal systems collapsing, they're protected by guns and myths.
This is true enough in many parts of the world, but a careful reading of the history of English Common Law reveals a fascinatingly iterative legal process that formed a bulwark against monarchal oppression for hundreds of years.
Interesting, but I doubt that the legal system does much useful iteration anymore, considering that it can be 5 years (and many dollars) from novel conflict to Supreme Court ruling. Unless the adaptation rate scales exponentially with the number of rulings, that's too slow.
If you look at areas of current evolution like patent law, you'll see that iteration is still taking place. Each case builds on the body of the precedent built before it. Right now the concept of 'software patents' is not legally defined, current precedent is aimed at figuring out just what that means. Math isn't patentable, that much is established. Is software math? Questions that seem simple on the surface become very complicated when applied to the real world. That's what the iteration is aimed at doing, solving tough questions of language.
Constitutional law is under constant iteration, the Supreme Court often makes decisions about which cases to take based on whether it thinks it will be able to advance the state of that area of law.
If you subscribe to blogs like Popehat, you can get a feel for this iteration/evolution process and how it works in modern times.
Which is interesting, because the vast majority of people (including and perhaps especially those who reject intelligent design in biology) think that a relatively stable and successful society and economy can only exist when organized by a centrally and deliberately planned body called government. That's essentially the "intelligent design" belief for human societies.
If you believe that intelligence is the product of natural selection, and also observe that nature has very strongly selected for human social organization under a government, it's far from unreasonable to use the advantage of the intelligence we've evolved to augment the advantages of the governments we've evolved.
Natural selection often creates a relationship between predator and prey that looks red in tooth and claw -- bears and salmon, wolves and elk, etc.. No one will argue that the wolf represents an advantage to any individual elk, but to the elk genotype, the argument can be made that the wolf confers an advantage.
It's the same with governments and people -- history proves that relationship red in tooth and claw as well. The surviving elk outrun the wolves, and the surviving people stay one step ahead of predatory governments.
When Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler, he began a purge of his military. Anyone who had spoken against Hitler beforehand was purged -- shot or sent to Siberia. Then, when Hitler broke the pact and invaded Russia, all those officers who had spoken in Hitler's favor were purged. The survivors were those few who didn't have an opinion, or who didn't dare express it.
The Cultural Revolution in China purged all those bourgeois elitists who had a college degree or who had acquired skills like science and technology, or any significant academic achievement. Now everything has changed and individual Chinese are allowed -- nay, encouraged -- to educate themselves for success, acquire wealth, and grow the economy -- exactly the opposite of the Cultural Revolution outlook. It is a very wise person who avoided any problems during the Cultural Revolution, and who avoid any problems now.
My point? Elk who survive do so by avoiding wolves. People who survive do so by avoiding governments. It's true that wolves improve the genetic stock of elk, just as governments improve the genetic stock of people, and by the same method -- by tearing the weak and sick to pieces.
I never made that argument that anything is good or bad because nature has selected strongly for it. That's essentially an appeal to nature. Nature strongly selected for using animals as a main land transportation mechanism for a long time, but hopefully no one would argue that therefore no one should have worked at discovering a better alternative.
Even if government is the best way to organize society at the moment, that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to look for better alternatives. But again, none of this has to do with the analogy to intelligent design I was making.
"Relatively stable and successful" is, of course, relative. When judged against the hypothetical outcomes of roads not traveled, they could look like ongoing atrocities.
I liked your comment, and share a lot of your cynicism about the legal system.
To be fair, though, I think you see technology and code in too positive a light, because code is also often a means for accruing power.
Your own example of a cell phone app that keeps track of restaurant ratings could serve to illustrate this quite well: such services have a tendency to become highly centralized with at most a handful of alternatives. [0]
Whoever controls the rating service then has considerable power, because they get to subtly influence the way that results are displayed, which can directly influence restaurants' bottom line.
This type of thing is even more obvious with services like Google and Facebook. Just something to keep in mind before patting oneself too much on the back...
[0] This is due to network effects: people use the service with the highest pervasiveness (basically, the most ratings and comments), and the service with the most users tends to get the most ratings and comments.
Why else does every coding language provide plain-language comments, but legal documents do not?
In technology, the machine is a stand-in for a human relationship - the cell phone app keeps track of restaurant ratings so people don't have to keep asking one another. The code is a part of the system of distributing the power in the form of information.
In the legal world, the intently obscure language is the means of hoarding and securing the power.
W/r/t to legal systems collapsing, they're protected by guns and myths. The baillifs and police believe Columbus was a hero and they kill to uphold his dream. The incentive to power is enough to entice enough new scholars each year to sustain the illusion.
So to respond to the poster above, the pains of the programmer and legal system are no more similar than the programmer and the chef. Each attempts to communicate a procedure, but the legal system has an entirely different and less noble set of requirements.