Programmers who are able to evaluate their code every second (in a read-eval-print loop) are more productive than programmers who need to compile their code for a minute, and those are vastly more productive than programmers who write their programs on punch cards and evaluate them batched at night.
Lawyers, as far as I've been able to tell, only get to evaluate contracts every time a suit goes to trial, which is, what, every 10 years or so? And if Bill Clinton is right in challenging what "is" is, then any word's meaning can potentially be modified by any ruling.
The problem may be that the evaluation procedure is so much less straightforward than with running code. We got legalese because colloquial English is an even worse way of specifying precise documents, but I'd love to see law documents become computer programs like financial contracts can be. (See http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers... for a particularly elegant example.)
Lawyers, as far as I've been able to tell, only get to evaluate contracts every time a suit goes to trial, which is, what, every 10 years or so? And if Bill Clinton is right in challenging what "is" is, then any word's meaning can potentially be modified by any ruling.
The problem may be that the evaluation procedure is so much less straightforward than with running code. We got legalese because colloquial English is an even worse way of specifying precise documents, but I'd love to see law documents become computer programs like financial contracts can be. (See http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers... for a particularly elegant example.)