Comment by steego
3 years ago
I suspect the motivation of this project is a lot more practical than what you’re projecting onto it, and I suspect you might be discounting how often law is transformed into code that runs on state IT systems.
As someone who is familiar with the process of turning statutes into code, I can appreciate what this project endeavors to do, even if the value is limited to providing clarification for software developers.
It is hugely useful. I worked on implementation of law in code for 10 years and the big problem is this: there's a constant communication between software devs and law poeple. For exmaple "did you code this like that ?", "why did the system did that ?", "if I code this way, does it reflect the law precisely ?". You have to constantly trnaslate from the code base to the language of lawyers and vice versa. Doing that with regular code is no good: regular code ends up mixing law code and technical code. Making a clear separation with a dedicated language is a big plus.