[HN Gopher] CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law spec...
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CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification
Author : gorenb
Score : 272 points
Date : 2023-09-17 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| pvaldes wrote:
| "We" will interpret the law for you and the judges, and "we" are
| not suspicious at all of having a hidden agenda to replace "the
| law" by "how we see the law" to benefit ourselves.
|
| Is this a joke?
| EPWN3D wrote:
| I don't think there's much of a problem with actually reasoning
| about a law's text that a computer can help solve. The
| complicated bit is weighing equities, which still requires humans
| and lawyers.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Absolutely. Although the clarity by creating algorithms from
| tax tables can be helpful, and sometimes the wording seems
| ambiguous. Although you probably also need lots and lots of
| examples. (It is as if you need unit tests!)
| btilly wrote:
| I think you meant, "...humans, lawyers, and bribes."
|
| No, I don't have a lot of faith in our legal system. Why do you
| ask?
| dazzaji wrote:
| I'm really interested in this project as another way to
| computationally express and use law. For more color on the
| project, here is a demo and discussion "Idea Flow" session I did
| with the project leads: https://law.mit.edu/pub/ideaflow8
| Supply5411 wrote:
| Very cool. Pessimistically, I think that having a clear,
| understandable view of legal text so that people can navigate the
| law safely is against a lot of entrenched interests.
| [deleted]
| tgv wrote:
| I don't think it's that. It's hard to write legal texts, and
| sometimes it's better to be vague, so the courts have some
| freedom when establishing jurisprudence.
|
| Treaties can be written with vague wording to allow parties to
| sign it, even if there isn't 100% agreement. That's an old
| practice.
| Kretinsky wrote:
| On the contrary, it's much better to have very clear text,
| otherwise it will turn against the citizen.
|
| Imagine that you have an income tax where "income" isn't
| clearly defined. Someone will end up with an audit and a
| lawsuit from the tax office because their definition will be,
| of course, extensive (every income, including non-realized
| capital gains) whereas most citizens would only consider
| salaries.
|
| In the end, you create legal uncertainty, and give courts way
| too much power.
|
| For the record, I used to work for my country's government,
| and had to evaluate some laws in making that were written in
| an abstruse way. When I asked why, the civil servant told me
| that it was so "they could pick the most favorable meaning in
| the case of a lawsuit".
| bjt wrote:
| It's a balance. If you get too specific then your laws
| quickly become outdated as technology and society evolve.
| Or you miss corner cases by not enumerating every little
| scenario.
|
| So there are different tiers to deal with this.
|
| - Constitution - Very abstract and very rarely changed.
|
| - Statute - Sometimes abstract, sometimes specific.
|
| - Administrative rules. Very technical but still intended
| for broad application.
|
| - Individual court cases. Can be hyper specific.
| sixo wrote:
| It is probably better to be intentionally and clearly unclear
| when you want to be, and clearly algorithmic when you want
| that, than just stir it all together in the name of judicial
| discretion.
| Guvante wrote:
| I don't think the example given increases legibility.
|
| Programming tends to use less understandable but more precise
| verbiage in general.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| That's far too reductive. The law is abstract, and still needs
| to be interpreted and prudentially applied to specific
| situations, and you cannot capture all of that in the law a
| priori. Furthermore, having a computer crunch through a bunch
| of predicates is easy compared to getting the facts expressed
| in a form that is crunchable. So for specific and narrow
| applications where such representations are not costly to
| produce or already exist, such an application of computational
| law is feasible. But broadly? No.
|
| And then there's the distinction between _lex_ and _ius_ that I
| think needs to be considered in this context.
| cphoover wrote:
| This is interesting, and not to criticize, but I wonder if
| transformer model's accuracy in interpreting law will obviate the
| need for something like this.
|
| It would be interesting to train Large Language Transformer
| Models to generate this code for you based on the text in the
| laws. This way you have a deterministic testable output, without
| risk of hallucinations.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Even LLMs would be better off with a clear unambiguous syntax
| to define human laws and rules.
| lockedinspace wrote:
| Thought this was realated to the Catalan western romance
| language. Naming could confuse some Spanish and French users.
| [deleted]
| dathinab wrote:
| programmers love to propose using "programming language" or
| similar for law
|
| But this fails to realize that _ambiguity (in some ways) is a
| fundamental important part of law_.
|
| This is because the world itself is fundamental ambiguous (in
| some ways)/clear cut.
|
| Naturally not all ways of ambiguity are wanted.
|
| But you can be sure that with "code as law" the ways loopholes
| are abused will get worse in my opinion.
|
| I would even go as far that some many laws should be more focused
| on what should be upheld then the details how (which is
| fundamental less clear cut/more ambiguous).
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| Something like this got passing mention in Greg Bear's [1] book
| _Moving Mars_ (1993) [2], under the name _Legal Logic_. The
| (human) Martians used it with AI assistance to formulate
| legislation for their newly independent society.
|
| For those who don't know, Greg Bear was a well-known SF author
| who died less than a year ago. His passing was discussed here at
| the time [3] [4].
|
| He was one of the authors that influenced my youth a great deal,
| and I particularly remember this aspect of Moving Mars as
| catching my imagination, so will be interested to read what
| Catala has to offer.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Mars
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679668
|
| [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675708
| blagund wrote:
| My hunch is, in any sufficiently large rule set, there will be
| inconsistencies. Handwaily think Godel, or just the need for
| bounded domains in DDD.
|
| Humans (or, well, AI) is needed to cope with inconsistencies.
|
| That said, pointing out the fact of existence of inconsistencies
| could be very valuable. But a system needs to embrace them, not
| fight them.
| drdeca wrote:
| Godel's theorems don't imply inconsistency for all large
| systems (unless "large" is taken to mean something strange),
| just for systems which are both not super-weak in what they can
| say, and _complete_ (or if they have their own consistency as a
| theorem).
|
| I don't think Godel's theorems particularly support the claim
| you're making.
|
| In fact, here is an argument that a consistent rule-set (either
| can be extended to something consistent and complete, or ) can
| be extended to be made arbitrarily large and consistent:
|
| take a ruleset which is consistent, but for which there is
| something for which it has no prescription one way or the other
| (neither explicitly nor implied collectively by other rules)
| (I.e. "not complete"). Then, add a rule specifying that thing
| and nothing else which isn't implied by that thing. This will
| be consistent, as if it were not, then the negation of the rule
| added would have already been an implication.
|
| This will either yield a larger ruleset of the same kind
| (consistent and incomplete), or it will yield one which is
| consistent and complete. Godel's theorems show that if the
| ruleset is an axiom system which is sufficiently expressive
| (e.g. contains Peano arithmetic) then the latter cannot be the
| result. So in this case, there are arbitrarily large extensions
| of the rule-set.
|
| If it isn't an axiom system, or is one for a rather weak
| system, then the "the result is a consistent and complete
| system" option, well, why would you want it to be larger?
|
| Edit: perhaps what you are calling "inconsistencies" are what I
| would just call "exceptions"/"exceptional cases"?
|
| To my mind, "embracing an inconsistency" doesn't seem to make
| much sense in the case of law? Something has to be what
| actually happens. We (whether fortunately or unfortunately)
| cannot bring an actual contradiction into reality.
|
| Well, I suppose if one takes a sub-truth(not sure if this is
| the right terminology? I mean the opposite of super-truth)
| approach to vague statements, one might say that a somewhat-
| bald man causes the statement "that man is bald, and also that
| man is not bald" to be true (and also false), and as such
| "bring a contradiction into reality", but that's not what I
| mean by the phrase.
|
| I mean there is no full precise-ification of any statement,
| which we can cause to be simultaneously true and false irl.
|
| Those acting as agents of the law must behave in some
| particular way.
|
| When legal requirements contradict, people will not satisfy
| both of them. Perhaps one will be considered to take priority.
| Perhaps a compromise position between the requirements will be
| sought. Perhaps it will be left to the judgement of those
| following it in a case-by-case basis.
|
| But in none of these cases is a contradiction implemented. Can
| they really be said to be embracing the contradiction?
|
| Upon writing this edit I realize that I'm probably
| misinterpreting that part of your comment. I suppose the thing
| you are saying to embrace is not the individual contradictions
| themselves, so much as the system's rules-as-written _having_
| contradictions, and therefore the necessity of dealing with
| such contradictions when implementing the rules, as the
| scenarios to which the contradictory statements apply, occur.
| kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
| I think parent might have been referring to the inconsistency
| that Godel noticed in the US Constitution when applying for
| citizenship.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| without formal training, one key thing I picked up is that most
| public understanding of legal concepts diverges from court
| understanding because law follows _logical_ and /or gates
|
| so "and" isnt a list of accepted criteria, it is a list of things
| that must be simultaneously satisfied
|
| but its only using logical gates _most_ of the time
|
| this is a good step in showing that. not a panacea but a good
| step!
| codedokode wrote:
| Laws are often written in most vague language to allow wide
| interpretation, especially laws regarding treason, communism,
| foreign agents, anti-war speeches and such things. Programming
| language won't help here.
| anticristi wrote:
| I'm also somewhat skeptical. How would a program deduce that
| "cookies and similar technologies" will mean localStorage,
| sessionStorage, IndexedDB, etc. Remember that the law was
| written well before some of these technologies even existed.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Lawyer here.
|
| Oh, this again. I suppose this looks relatively harmless, but I'm
| always wary of "law is like computer code."
|
| The impulse to think this can strongly solve any real problem _in
| the law_ is intuitively attractive, but I strongly predict this
| mostly never happens; it 's the law's job to be intensely
| practical in the face of hard-edged "computer-like" rules.
|
| If anything, you get goofy confusion about what things "are?" My
| go-to on this is always the "smart contract" -- which can be
| useful little bits of automated robot money moving code, but
| emphatically are neither "smart" nor "contracts."
| giltho wrote:
| I can assure you that the person who wrote this is very well
| aware of the subtleties involved with formalising the law. Law
| + Programming is an active research field
| (https://popl23.sigplan.org/home/prolala-2023), and it is
| _very_ far away from anything like smart contracts, it is full
| of brilliant people who have no pretension of replacing the law
| with computers, but simply be helpers where they can.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Sure, I think I posted my response not because "it could
| never solve ANY problems," but instead "way too many non-
| lawyers, especially techy-non-lawyers, have the deeply
| misplaced idea that is a very important, perhaps THE most
| important, problem to solve in the law." It's just not very
| high on the list at all.
| sfvisser wrote:
| > It's just not very high on the list at all.
|
| Maybe not for lawyers, no. But as a citizen I'm expected to
| comply with the law, with many many laws. It'd actually be
| nice if law was slightly more formally verifiable, so it
| would be easier for me to understand what to comply with.
|
| Being able to break down clauses into more logical normal
| forms would probably greatly enhance the possibility of
| compliance.
| gorenb wrote:
| I agree. The idea of logically representing law isn't the
| same as replacing law with computers. That's why I even
| posted this.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| This is a problem, but not one that Catala suffers from on a
| first reading.
|
| Some elements of law _are_ amenable to translation into source
| code, and indeed anyone working in fintech will probably have
| done that at some point. If the law gives a threshold for a tax
| allowance, for example, you need to encode that requirement _in
| accordance with the law_. Being able to mark up the text of
| each regulation should make it much easier to be confident you
| 've not missed anything.
|
| Trying to write non-financial regulation as code is pretty much
| doomed to failure. But to the extent that tax or benefits
| regulations set out numbers that we have to translate into code
| _anyway_ , it's good to have that code be verifiable against
| the specific regulatory text.
| btown wrote:
| Law is like computer code, if:
|
| - your compiler was AI-complete and adversarial and hated you
|
| - your compiler was also not bound by any hard rules and could
| emit undefined behavior at any time
|
| - your job scheduling and orchestration system was AI-complete
| and adversarial and _actively_ hated you
|
| - your runtime library had 50 different incompatible canonical
| implementations and can only be run by being forked by
| publicly-elected officials who blindly merge patches from bad-
| faith lobbyists
|
| - the documentation for any of those 50 runtime libraries is
| paywalled _per page_ behind https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pacer-
| pricing-how-fees-work _if you 're lucky_
|
| - the IDE is Microsoft Word, and the linter is a summer
| associate on their tenth cup of coffee
|
| - you will inevitably get a non-technical client who thinks
| that the more times you have "notwithstanding the foregoing" in
| your code the more you can call yourself Web Scale
| [deleted]
| Rochus wrote:
| > _Oh, this again. I suppose this looks relatively harmless,
| but I 'm always wary of "law is like computer code."_
|
| "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
| (Twain?)
|
| Hasn't Cyc impressively demonstrated just how incredibly
| difficult and costly it is to formalize even the most basic
| matters of daily life?
|
| There already was a discussion two years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059899
| mdaniel wrote:
| > Hasn't Cyc impressively demonstrated just how incredibly
| difficult and costly it is to formalize even the most basic
| matters of daily life?
|
| I would offer that the "cost/benefit" analysis for such a
| formalism exists on at least two axes: the concept domain
| which one is attempting to formalize, and the benefit (and/or
| size of consumers) of any such working system
|
| I can wholly understand that trying to translate the entirety
| of English into a formal logic system sounds overwhelming.
| But to side with a sibling commenter, why not at least start
| with the tax code which is a personal pain point, has
| (presumably) a correct outcome for some cases, and is mostly
| algorithms-in-English
|
| And then, for the consumer side: ok, if I snapped my fingers
| and Cyc existed and worked I struggle to think how exactly my
| life would change. If the formally-specified tax code existed
| and worked I wouldn't have to rage-upvote almost every
| comment on the _annual tax hatred thread_
|
| I would even offer that an incomplete version could still be
| useful if one left "fuzzy" variables in the corpus, and said
| "welp, we can't define what a $Person is because of the
| hundreds of years of precedent, so you'll need an actual
| Judge for that". I don't meant to say that 50% of the corpus
| can be undefined variables, that's just silly, but I'd hope
| the tax code isn't built upon 50% undefined behavior, even if
| accountants want you to think it is
| Rochus wrote:
| > _why not at least start with the tax code_
|
| There have been many such attempts (e.g. NKRL by Zarri et
| al., also funded by EU). There are even societies that have
| been dealing with such issues for many decades (e.g.
| http://www.iaail.org). The formalization of law and
| language is only one of the issues. Like many previous
| attempts, this one suffers from the fuzziness of human
| language (even in the case of tax code). Fuzziness is not a
| drawback; it is what makes it possible to communicate
| efficiently in the first place. In order for us to
| communicate effectively, we need an enormous amount of
| tacit knowledge about our environment that our culture and
| life experience brings. If one tries to formalize the
| language, as in the present approach, one must also take
| this knowledge into account, down to the last detail (an
| "upper ontology" is by far not sufficient for this, and Cyc
| after decades is still not finished). And the tacit
| knowledge and also the moral valuation of the same change
| over time. And there are things like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox which stand
| in the way of a complete formalization. Lenat's 1990 book
| addressed many of the issues, but also his more recent
| talks are very informative where he demonstrates how they
| had to extend the Cyc representation language to cope with
| the problem, and why e.g. RDF triples are not enough.
| lemper wrote:
| how many times have you fought in court to argue about "the
| spirit of the law"? I, for one, don't really care about this
| lang or "law is computer code" thing. just wanted to know
| lawyers life, I guess.
| sealeck wrote:
| I agree with you, but this is literally what those in civil law
| jurisdictions believe.
|
| There are some areas where automating things can be effective -
| e.g. tax systems.
| hedora wrote:
| I like to turn this argument around to see how absurd it is.
|
| Why not just take the existing law, and have a machine execute
| it in the style of a computer program?
|
| We wouldn't need judges juries or lawyers. You'd just type the
| specifics of your case and any supporting documents/evidence
| into the computer and a verdict would pop out.
|
| Of course, the system could be used for other stuff too, like
| checking building code compliance or engineering soundness,
| signing off on military and police action, setting the
| executive branch's priorities, and so on.
| jraph wrote:
| Not a lawyer. My thinking is very likely naive as I have no
| experience in this matter.
|
| I see two potential issues:
|
| - Picking evidences. "Evaluating" the law might need access
| to all the possible evidences that could exist, but that
| would certainly never be true, so you'd need someone to know
| which evidences to present. You probably cannot rely on some
| interactive process asking you such and such evidences
| because it would be presenting evidence that would trigger
| evaluations of chunks of laws. I would guess a lawyer with
| good knowledge of the law would probably be needed for this.
|
| - Setting precedents. Wouldn't the "automated" law evaluation
| run into unprecedented cases all the time? You'd need someone
| to constantly issue a verdict on unforeseen situations all
| the time, and I guess you'd need a judge for this.
|
| Maybe it could work on many "trivial" cases though.
| 0thgen wrote:
| Some people have argued that the fuzziness of the legal
| system can be a good feature for some reason, but you could
| always have a machine execute the law and a human make the
| final call. So you wouldn't need judges, juries, or lawyers,
| but you would need a team of legal shamans that sign off on
| verdicts
| hedora wrote:
| The problem isn't checking the computer's output.
|
| It is that the law would need to encode all the stuff I
| said, so it would need to be nuanced enough to replace all
| engineering, leadership and administration roles. (And also
| anything involving ethics.)
| diogenes4 wrote:
| > If anything, you get goofy confusion about what things "are?"
| My go-to on this is always the "smart contract" -- which can be
| useful little bits of automated robot money moving code, but
| emphatically are neither "smart" nor "contracts."
|
| They are contracts--just not legal contracts. One of many types
| of contracts in the world that are not legal constructs.
| Angostura wrote:
| Most contracts are intended to be enforceable by law, as far
| as I know. Which kind of non-enforceable contracts did you
| have in mind?
| diogenes4 wrote:
| Social contracts? Personal contracts? God-sworn oaths?
| Covenants? The legal system is just a small corner of the
| universe.
| layer8 wrote:
| Software-interface contracts generally aren't (cf. Design
| by Contract). The parent is correct insofar as the use of
| the word "contract" is not limited to contracts as defined
| by law.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Right, I mean, I've heard this use and I think it's kind
| of silly.
|
| It's like calling a hopefully-completed-circuit in some
| device an "electric contract" or something like that.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's a contract (mutual agreement) between the client
| code and the implementation of the interface. The
| implementation fulfills certain obligations provided the
| client code fulfills certain other obligations. The
| interface defines what those obligations are. If the
| client code fails to meet its obligations, then the
| implementation of the interface isn't bound to fulfill
| its obligations anymore either. The point is to think in
| terms of two parties, where the developer who is either
| using or implementing an interface takes on the role of
| one of the two contractual parties.
| pjot wrote:
| > They are contracts--just not legal contracts
|
| I think this proves op's point of goofy confusion for what
| things are.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| Like, what language is? I'm not sure i get the point.
| Horffupolde wrote:
| How is this different from Prolog?
| RedNifre wrote:
| Will it help?
|
| On the one hand, I think it would be fantastic, if you had
| automated tests for the law. For example, when German politicians
| introduced the "hacker law", you could have pointed out that
| "This new law would break the 'security researchers need to be
| allowed to do penetration testing' test".
|
| On the other hand, "Brexit is in conflict with the Good Friday
| Agreement, we need a solution for Nothern Ireland." was known
| without machine readable laws and test, but politicians ignored
| it anyway.
|
| Maybe what's needed is a law that outlaws test-breaking laws and
| requires politicians to fix the tests first, but I bet that would
| just result in a lot of "commented" tests.
| [deleted]
| gandalfgeek wrote:
| (self plug) They published a paper describing the language
| https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939, and here's a short video
| summary of it: https://youtu.be/OiaFTFSAa1I
| nologic01 wrote:
| This seems like a worthy project but I think its landing page
| should define the scope of what it aims to do in more concrete
| terms. Otherwise it runs the risk of being seen as overambitious
| and open ended without a concrete problem to solve.
|
| E.g. its not clear if there is an explicit or implicit ontology
| against which the validity of any codification can be checked.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Would be so funny if all the compute moves from AI to finding
| loopholes in the programmatically defined law.
| gorenb wrote:
| "haha! actually, if you give it this input, the program
| crashes! i can finally steal pillows from the bookstore!"
| sesm wrote:
| This project is doing code -> text, right?
|
| But then, the first line of description in Github says:
|
| > Catala is a domain-specific language for deriving faithful-by-
| construction algorithms from legislative texts.
|
| This reads like 'text -> code', which is the opposite of what
| this project seems to be doing.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| As someone who speaks Catalan, I find the name collision with the
| language referred to in the article most unfortunate.
| andrewnicolalde wrote:
| Why unfortunate? Also, I love your username. I think many of us
| could have guessed that you spoke Catalan from that alone ;).
| plumeria wrote:
| The Catalan language name is written Catala.
| entwife wrote:
| I also came to comment that the software's name might cause
| confusion with the human language, Catalan.
| melenaboija wrote:
| It is named after a French guy called Pierre Catala, not the
| language. Probably the name comes from the language but
| according to the documentation does not seem to be with acute
| accent.
|
| > The language is named after Pierre Catala, a professor of law
| who pionneered the French legaltech by creating a computer
| database of law cases, Juris-Data. The research group that he
| led in the late 1960s, the Centre d'etudes et de traitement de
| l'information juridique (CETIJ), has also influenced the
| creation by state conselor Lucien Mehl of the Centre de
| recherches et developpement en informatique juridique (CENIJ),
| which eventually transformed into the entity managing the
| LegiFrance website, acting as the public service of legislative
| documentation.
| Anduia wrote:
| Their research group is called 'Prosecco', and another of
| their projects at Inria is 'Squirrel'... Another one is F*
| (pronounced F star).
|
| I imagine that they find their naming choices amusing.
| racked wrote:
| The commenter was maybe pointing out a naming conflict.
| [deleted]
| pxc wrote:
| > the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent.
|
| 'a' has a grave accent, not an acute accent.
| melenaboija wrote:
| Yups right, sorry :(
| pxc wrote:
| I just figured that since you cared to name the specific
| accent character (most people probably wouldn't!), you'd
| care about the mixup too. :)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I think having a "linter" for laws can be beneficial. It can help
| producing laws that are easier to read and understand.
|
| Having a "compiler" for laws can help identifying conflicts
| between different codes of law. e.g.: Imagine having a compiler
| error when a law is unconstitutional from a logical standpoint.
|
| But verifying the "business logic" (e.g.: what is the spirit or
| intent of the law?) of the law will remain a human intelligence
| task.
| llsf wrote:
| Can we use it to compute taxes ?
| version_five wrote:
| What problem does this solve? It appears to add precision where
| it's mostly already clear - perhaps it can enforce some kind of
| rigor... but then like the example given uses "fair market value"
| as a term which I'd expect to be the kind of thing that's in
| contention, rather than any of the actual "logic", and it doesn't
| help with that.
|
| The reason we have courts and lawyers is because of the need for
| interpretation beyond just writing good logic, so I don't see how
| this can really do anything. Or is it for something else?
| 0thgen wrote:
| I suppose a formalized legal language could:
|
| - help in quickly testing whether newly drafted laws contradict
| existing laws(without needing to memorize the existing legal
| code)
|
| - check for redundancies
|
| - checking whether removing one law affects any others
|
| - statistically analyze legal systems in different countries
|
| Assuming any of those are important issues in law. I'm not sure
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Catala still produces plaintext legal documents at the end of
| the day but can be seen as a markup language for those
| documents. But because that markup language is a whole lot more
| precise than the legal text itself, it can be a bit more
| versatile.
|
| Examples of how this could be useful:
|
| - Reducing the overhead for maintaining a list of semantic
| translations of that legal code into other languages. Of course
| the official language is the only one that is "legal" but the
| other translations should be close enough to effectively
| express the nuance provided the language outputs are maintained
| by people who can actually speak those languages.
|
| - Producing machine executable proof or simulation code. This
| could be used for "fuzzing" the legal code to identify
| loopholes or unintended outcomes so that legislators can then
| propose improved terms to avoid those issues. This is by no
| means "making code law" but it provides an additional tool for
| understanding the law and how the many different parts of the
| legal code interact with each other.
|
| - Adding on to the previous example, sim code could be
| integrated into complex models for simulating the impact of
| legal changes on the economy at large or specific segments.
|
| - Finance related code can be used to generate a tool or API
| for validating tax, accounting, and compliance documents (as a
| first pass to catch errors early and reduce overhead) as well
| as to even prepare some of those documents. These tools often
| already exist but they are one or more steps removed from the
| actual legal definition which increases the risk of error as
| well as the overhead of maintaining them (which can potentially
| encourage rent seeking behavior by commercial providers of
| these tools).
|
| France actually is already doing this to a reasonable degree
| albeit the "codified" version is based on the law rather than
| the codified version producing plaintext law. The DGFiP [1]
| maintains a gitlab organisation [2] that includes both Catala
| and MLang [3] representations of different parts of the french
| legal code for exactly these purposes.
|
| 1.
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_d...
|
| 2. https://gitlab.adullact.net/dgfip
|
| 3. https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang
| retrac wrote:
| > Of course the official language is the only one that is
| "legal"
|
| If only! Here in Canada there are two official languages. All
| laws are drafted, and enacted, in both English and French.
| Both versions are equally valid, equally binding. And,
| sometimes, they don't say the same thing.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Yeah that's common in a number of other countries as well.
| I should have probably said "the official languages are the
| only ones that are legal" instead. In which case a tool
| like this could be useful for helping maintain that
| equivalence.
| parineum wrote:
| >It appears to add precision where it's mostly already clear -
| perhaps it can enforce some kind of rigor...
|
| I'd argue that the imprecision of law is more feature than bug.
| Rules as written have edge cases and, as long as the law is
| written in natural language, you can get a feel for their
| intent and that helps Judges decide what to do in those
| situations.
| [deleted]
| kstrauser wrote:
| I think what I'd rather see is a standardize test suite format
| for laws that spells out the intentions.
|
| Once I lived in a state that proposed a very simple anti-child
| porn law with good intent, but it was _too_ simple. It read sort
| of like "anyone sending explicit pictures of minors from a cell
| phone will be guilty of conveying child porn". It was written in
| the proper legal jargon, but wasn't a whole lot more detailed
| than that. I called the sponsor of the bill and asked if that
| meant if my hypothetical daughter sent a naked picture of herself
| to her boyfriend, then wouldn't she be a felon under his new law?
| He had an "oh, crap, that's not what I meant!" reaction and ended
| up withdrawing the bill so it could be re-written. (Aside: I felt
| pretty good about that. Props to the legislator for being quick
| to understand and respond appropriately!)
|
| Imagine if that were handled like program code, with a test like:
|
| * This law does not apply to minors sending pictures of
| themselves.
|
| That would do a few big things:
|
| It would make legislators be clear about what they mean. "Oh,
| we'd never use this online child safety law to ban pro-trans
| content from the Internet!" "Great! Let's add that as a test case
| then." I confess that this is a deal breaker: politicians don't
| like being pinned down like that.
|
| It would probably make it easier to write laws that reflect those
| intentions. "Hey, that law as written would apply to a 15 year
| old sexting her boyfriend! The code doesn't pass the tests."
|
| Future courts could use that to evaluate a law's intent. "The
| wording _says_ it applies to 15 year olds sending selfies, but
| the tests are explicit that it wasn 't meant to. Not guilty."
|
| I'm sure this couldn't happen for a hundred reasons, but I can
| dream.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I partly like this idea in theory, but believe it is literally
| 100% impossible to come up with a better "test suite" than "the
| actual court system?"
| alexashka wrote:
| If it was 'literally 100% impossible', you wouldn't need to
| believe it, you'd _know_ it to be so.
|
| As for test suites and courts - the two are complementary so
| there's need to compare them to one another.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The courts have to evaluate what they think the law's
| drafters meant: Yeah, it _says_ this, but it 's obvious the
| legislators didn't _mean_ for it to be read that way. It 'd
| be nice if there were footnotes that expounded on what the
| authors were trying to accomplish to help courts interpret
| the laws.
| bjt wrote:
| At least in the US, it's not the drafters' intent that
| matters, but the intent of the legislators who voted on it.
| (Legislators actually have lawmaking power. Drafters are
| usually unelected staff or even lobbyists.)
|
| When a statute is ambiguous, courts do sometimes look at
| the congressional record (eg floor debates) to determine
| intent.
| istjohn wrote:
| To add on that, there are several competing theories of
| statutory interpretation in US legal thought. It's a very
| complex subject. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutor
| y_interpretation#Sta...
| ambyra wrote:
| Yeah, there's no way that a modern computer could outdo the
| logical accuracy and processing power of our 300 year old
| legal system. Court rooms and arguing and paperwork, much
| more efficient than silicon.
| cutler wrote:
| With developments in AI I doubt that will stand the test of
| time.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| Courts and lawyers are efficient at generating large pay
| checks for lawyers.
|
| They are horrible at everything else.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Mindblown. I went to law school and now work as a developer but
| never thought about it. Writing tests for laws should totally
| be a thing.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Writing tests for laws should totally be a thing.
|
| It is a thing already. In both the US and Germany it is
| common for lawmakers and regulators (e.g. the FCC which was
| here on HN to solicit comments a few days ago) to provide
| drafts of laws and regulations to interest groups so that
| these can raise issues they find.
| mertd wrote:
| Also free agent simulations for discovering unintended
| consequences
| codesnik wrote:
| law tests would be good, though they probably have to be
| "evaled" via the same mechanism which would apply them.
| Meaning, courts :\
|
| I personally would be happy if any country would attach
| rationale for the law to the law itself. And possibly some KPI
| to see if it works. So the law could be reevaluated later, to
| see if it works at all, or maybe counterproductive, or maybe
| some major actual application of the law is not why it was
| introduced.
| lolinder wrote:
| 99% of the work is in coming up with the edge cases, and in law
| the most common thing to do with edge cases is call them out
| explicitly. I imagine the legislator went back and added a
| clause to the law that specified "it shall not be considered a
| violation of this section for a minor to send photos of
| themselves".
|
| Laws don't need to be computer-executable, they're about intent
| and the interpretation thereof, so the test suite itself is
| really part of the law and may as well just be embedded in it.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| I think for something like this to be effective, you need the
| actual intent encoded correctly (so this use case wouldn't have
| been solved), and lawmakers acting in good faith (i.e., not
| drafting legislation that's intentionally vague such that it
| can cast a wide net and force people to use the courts to
| dispute things).
| irundebian wrote:
| Intent could be derived by parliament debates minutes.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Yeah, uhh, having seen some of the hearings in recent state
| legislatures regarding abortion, that's some flawed
| thinking. Lawmakers are intentionally vague throughout the
| entire process sometimes.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative
| literate programming_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24948342 - Oct 2020 (37
| comments)
| cpeterso wrote:
| Interesting that their "money" type doesn't allow fractional
| cents or track the currency. And the only collection type is a
| fixed-sized list. I can imagine a lot of other useful base types
| that would be useful for laws about the real world, such as
| physical units like meters.
|
| https://catala-lang.org/en/examples/tutorial#The%20Catala%20...
| brap wrote:
| It's good that they made it not turing complete but they should
| probably also force an upper bound on law complexity
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| t2b1 wrote:
| Completely unrelated to Catalan (Catala), the language spoken in
| Catalonia (Catalunya). I think if someone wants to google a
| question about this, "catala language beginner hello world" won't
| help them much.
| medstrom wrote:
| I can only conclude that they didn't know that. It's such a bad
| name; we won't even be able to google "catala lang" because ...
| Catala is also a "lang"!
|
| Imagine someone creates a programming language called Russian.
| Good luck googling "russian lang".
| _visgean wrote:
| given that the major contributors seems to be from paris /
| bordeaux i am pretty sure they know about catalan.
| skissane wrote:
| > given that the major contributors seems to be from paris
| / bordeaux i am pretty sure they know about catalan.
|
| Yes, but did they know that _catala_ is Catalan for
| Catalan? In French, as in English, it is _catalan_ instead
| (well, English always capitalises it, French doesn 't, but
| the spelling is identical).
| hiq wrote:
| You'd write "catalalang" just like you write "golang", if you
| really need. I think in most context, search engines would be
| able to infer the context.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| thargor90 wrote:
| Too have fun with laws/rule systems take a look at nomic
| mdaniel wrote:
| linky-linky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
|
| an example of the game rules:
| https://agoranomic.org/ruleset/slr.txt
|
| In the context of this thread, I'm sad that the game rules
| don't appear to be in a constrained vocabulary
| [deleted]
| swayvil wrote:
| A software for people. For dictating human behavior. Is that what
| we're looking at here?
| kderbyma wrote:
| Started something like this years ago with a company that ended
| up pivoting to a slightly different direction after a while. glad
| to see something in open source space.
| simplify wrote:
| Also see Logical English, a "Programming Language for Law and
| Ethics"
|
| https://virtuale.unibo.it/pluginfile.php/1273247/mod_unibore...
| qaq wrote:
| Naming is hard Catala is cardsharper (cheat) in russian.
| lightedman wrote:
| No way would this ever be a good idea. Language changes too much,
| be it human or machine. This is why you need flexibility, not a
| rigid structure, in making law.
| greybox wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing something like this for verifying
| game designs / new game rules given an existing design
| GolDDranks wrote:
| Why? What do game designs have to do with law?
| 0x9b wrote:
| Games are activities bound by rules. Laws are rules for
| government/governed.
|
| AFAIK There's not really a programming language specific for
| describing how players interact in a game, so although
| there's no reason you couldn't implement it in any old
| programming language. I guess the same thing could be said of
| the law too until Catala.
| altair8800 wrote:
| Wouldn't that just be writing test cases against the
| business logic of your game?
| Martinussen wrote:
| I assume they're talking about tabletop/board games and
| such, not video games.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| What are the authors' goals, what is their intended purpose? I
| can't find a mission statement on their website.
| turtleyacht wrote:
| It would be interesting to also "weave" in test cases. The
| workface of logic statements is exactly where bugs are
| introduced.
|
| Especially around temporal events, and that goes to formal models
| (and even more bugs).
|
| Typically, if there is a rule around height, there would be at
| least three tests1: one taller, one equal to, and one shorter.
| (Without types or something, then also negative, null, and
| max/min boundary inputs too.)
|
| So you could have tests based on timelines, like
| Given a regulation is passed in 3 months And parties are
| prevented from exercising B But "17 tons" of waste are
| dumped anyway And ... When ... Then ...
|
| Having a model checker integrated would be a boon. Maybe we could
| have DevOps-like pipelines in formally-verified legislature (or
| at least the encoding of language to code).
|
| 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_partitioning
| octacat wrote:
| It will not compile (sarcasm).
|
| Many laws are written with a lot of double meaning (recent eu
| regulations on allowing or not allowing russian cars is a good
| example).
|
| Though, it could be a good idea to find all the possible double
| meanings or vague definition when trying to "digitise" the laws
| into the programming language.
| az09mugen wrote:
| That would be nice also to have unit tests
| natn wrote:
| imagine... TTD applied to laws.
|
| Or take it a step further, write a test suite and automatically
| generate a range of possible laws that satisfy the tests.
| jeppester wrote:
| For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something
| exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out
| to have existed probably all the time.
|
| I think this is truly awesome.
|
| Every law should be written in a language like this, and
| presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent
| formatting rules.
|
| Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the
| law language.
|
| I believe it would greatly improve everyone's ability to read
| laws and be confident about their understanding of them, which
| would be a huge boon for society.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works,
| probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure
| wording tricks.
|
| In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal
| language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they
| mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal
| concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they
| end up in a tangle of references to other laws and regulations
| and legal precedent etc.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I don't know if what you say about laws is correct, but it's
| certainly not a correct description of contracts. The general
| public is constantly confronted with utterly unreasonable
| legal documents: far too long, far too unclear, far too
| complex. The lawyers writing these, and the entities paying
| them, both know that the public will never read or understand
| them. It's pure cinicism.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, but that wouldn't change if they were written in
| code. It would probably get much worse, in fact.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| I think this is a big part of it. My sense (as a non-lawyer
| who has looked at a fair number of laws and contracts) is
| that, in addition, there are plenty of laws and contracts
| that are just poorly written and wording or constructions
| that lawyers have retained out of caution or traditionalism.
| This last case, traditionalism and caution, is maybe a
| special case of the other cases, but it's not always obvious.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I believe that another thing that happens, and it is common
| in every field, is that certain constructions are very
| common within the field, and so the need arises among
| practitioners to shorten them. Most domains invent new
| words, but this doesn't work for laws and contracts (since
| they need to at least in principle be understandable to
| non-practitioners, such as most elected officials).
|
| So instead of full-on jargon, legal texts get enshrined
| phrases, which practitioners can essentially skip over, but
| which also retain some meaning in plain English (though
| often sounding antiquated).
| pydry wrote:
| I worked for a company that translated certain kinds of
| legal contract into what was effectively a DSL. They could
| then be represented in a simplified way. That was the whole
| business.
|
| The CEO (a lawyer) claimed that the lawyers who wrote these
| things would deliberately and unnecesarily overcomplicate
| them so that they could maximize billable hours.
|
| I think they could quite easily have been templated using a
| DSL but that DSL would need frequent maintenance. These
| types of contracts did evolve as new types of clauses and
| legal constructs popped up and gradually evolved from "new"
| to "standard" to "boilerplate".
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The text of a contract can either be long and very
| explicit, or short but full of implicit assumptions. A
| DSL is the second kind: you encode those assumptions I
| the structure of the DSL and the text as written is based
| on all of those assumptions.
|
| The problem than becomes that anyone who wants to
| understand the contract now has to read not just the
| contract as written, but also all of the definition of
| the DSL itself. This can actually be OK if the DSL is
| very commonly used, such as a DSL for contracts between
| two parties which sign new contracts every day.
|
| But it is a huge waste of time for parties which rarely
| sign contacts, and is often used as an explicit moat to
| keep laymen from participating. If I give you a contract
| to sign that isn't even written in plain English, you
| will have no choice but to hire a lawyer specialized in
| understanding this contract DSL to advocate for you.
|
| I imagine (savvy) lawyers actually love DSLs that purport
| to make contracts concise.
| gorenb wrote:
| As someone who has tried to read the Black's law dictionary
| once, I must tell you that the law does use _a lot_ of formal
| language.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It does, to some extent, but it's still much closer to
| natural language than code. Expressing the law in code
| would turn this dial up to 11 and then some.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| The words _almost_ always mean _almost_ exactly what they
| mean in plain English. That's why the law is a huge mess.
|
| As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of
| "child" there are in the US law and how many times it's used
| undefined.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of
| "child" there are in the US law and how many times it's
| used undefined.
|
| Which is why it is the common standard in German law to
| define every possibly unclear term either in the relevant
| section of the law itself or in an introduction article.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I don't agree that the law is a huge mess. It is certainly
| far less of a mess than any code base I've ever seen, given
| the gigantic scope of what it applies to, and how many
| people if affects.
|
| Note that the legal system is indeed a huge mess, but that
| happens because of many other reasons - not a problem with
| the wording or vagueness of the law, but with the explicit
| (malicious) intentions of law-makers, judges, police and
| others involved in the whole process.
|
| For your example of "child": how often does it actually
| cause a problem in practice? How many people have been
| improperly punsihed/set free because of a poor
| interpretation of the word "child" in a specific law? This
| is far more relevant than every law taking up valuable
| space to define what such a common word means.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > How many people have been improperly punsihed/set free
| because of a poor interpretation of the word "child" in a
| specific law?
|
| How many improperly punished people is good enough? How
| many cases go to Supreme Court because the amount of
| needless ambiguity just adds up, one word at a time?
|
| > This is far more relevant than every law taking up
| valuable space to define what such a common word means.
|
| Right? Why do many laws redefine it?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I don't know how many is good enough. If it's every other
| person, than that's bad; if it's two people since the law
| was written 50 years ago, I would say that's good enough
| in my book. Which is it?
|
| And no, cases don't often make it to the Supreme Court
| because the wording of the law is ambiguous. They make it
| to the SC because the parties disagree on legal
| principles and on whether laws are unconstituional or
| not.
|
| > Right? Why do many laws redefine it?
|
| I would have to see some specific examples to judge for
| myself. Still, this seems to be the opposite problem
| compared to what was raised earlier. So which is it? Do
| we want laws to be more explicit about their exact
| definitions of words, or more implicit?
| sheepscreek wrote:
| > ..and how many times it's used undefined
|
| This is the real advantage of codifying law into a
| programming language. You can have validation and
| assertion that is automated. And a strict structure, free
| from ambiguity.
|
| As an additional advantage, multilingualism becomes more
| accessible, with the codified program/definition acting
| as the lingua franca of law. Thus, someone who only knows
| English could make sense of Japanese laws by reading it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Why would you want every law that applies to children to
| explain what a child is? Why stop at child, perhaps each
| law should include a definition of every word it
| contains, right? That would certainly make every law much
| more readable for the masses.
|
| The text of the law is meant to be understood by the
| people that it applies to, i.e. everyone living in the
| locality which passed said law. Expressing law in a
| formal language goes directly against that goal. Imagine
| if a EULA you get presented with, instead of being a wall
| of repetitive text, would be a wall of code with symbols
| you at best remember from some class you took in 8th
| grade.
| jeppester wrote:
| I don't watch that kind of television much, but since I'm not
| a lawyer, my view of the world is probably too simplistic.
|
| Still I'd argue that normal language is very poor at handling
| that tangle of references.
|
| A good programming language would make those references very
| easy to untangle and present in their untangled form.
|
| When I've read (Danish) laws, I've often thought that they
| would read better as if statements.
|
| It's not that I think those laws are written in legalese,
| it's that they are expressing logic in a suboptimal way. Like
| how "four plus four equals eight" is a suboptimal way to
| express what could be expressed with 4+4=8.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > A good programming language would make those references
| very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form.
|
| Not necessarily. Notation can only do so much to help with
| understanding. To understand 4+4=8 you still need to
| understand what's a number, what addition means, and what
| it means for two numbers to be equal. The same problem
| applies to the law, and it takes far more time to
| understand legal concepts than the actual wording.
|
| Additionally, the law is not supposed to be some arcane
| discipline that you need to learn a new language for. The
| law is decided on by, and applies to, people who are not
| and have no reason to become legal experts. It is simply a
| statement of the rules by which we try to live.
|
| If laws were written in code, they would actually become
| much, much harder to understand than they already are for
| the vast majority of their audience. Imagine a public
| debate about a law where the text of the law was, instead
| of plain(ish) English, Haskell code. Imagine news anchors
| explaining that Biden agreed to add the lambda sign, but
| was heavily criticized by McConnell for his use of a monad
| instead of a plain for loop.
| jeppester wrote:
| > Additionally, the law is not supposed to be some arcane
| discipline that you need to learn a new language for.
|
| It would seem to me that reading laws has become an
| arcane discipline, partly due to it being expressed in a
| language with overly long sentences, which handles
| branches and references very poorly from a readability
| perspective.
|
| > Imagine news anchors explaining that Biden agreed to
| add the lambda sign, but was heavily criticized by
| McConnell for his use of a monad instead of a plain for
| loop.
|
| While that would surely be interesting to watch, I think
| we both know that's not what would happen.
|
| Like I wouldn't ask you "number four plus sign number
| four equal sign X?"
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I assure you that no one who fails to parse long
| sentences would get a _better_ understanding from
| replacing those with code of all things.
|
| And if the actual text of the law consisted of coding
| symbols, I very much expect that (a) you'd have endless
| debates about the precise symbols being used, and (b)
| have to have anchors going over the meaning of those
| symbols and losing 9/10ths of their audience along the
| way.
| swayvil wrote:
| And the links! OMG, you could trace precedents and
| justifications and citations all the way back to the ur-
| utterances of Hammurabi. Reading that stuff could be quite
| educational.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Am actually working on a project like this. Not quite to the
| level of insanity you're thinking about, but certainly a
| couple of thousand years.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| A big problem is you lose all the case law that interprets the
| law. Like discarding two centuries of bug reports and patches.
|
| At the same time, laws have been codified (i.e. the case law
| rewritten coherently, combining all the patches combined), such
| as the Uniform Commercial Code.
| bg46z wrote:
| Although in principle I agree with you, the law generally
| depends too much on interpretation and precedent to be
| expressed and understood like you're hoping for.
| jeppester wrote:
| That information should be available in summarized anonymized
| form, referenced from the law language.
|
| The judiciary should keep it up-to-date.
| slazaro wrote:
| I know that naming is hard, and it has already been mentioned in
| the comments here but... I can't believe that somebody named a
| programming language with the exact same name as an existing
| natural language spoken by millions of people.
|
| It just seems like a bizarre decision that can't be a benefit at
| all and can only have negative consequences. Just googling things
| about it is going to be hard. Why immediately create potential
| problems for yourselves when you can choose a name that's not an
| issue?
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| goofy; the language you're talking about is Catalan of
| Catalonia, not `catala`.
|
| > Just googling things about it is going to be hard
|
| when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?
|
| edit: fine, it's called catala in catalonian itself - this is
| so pedantic now that i might as well at this point say that the
| missing diacritic is sufficient to disambiguate.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Catala is the name of the language in Catalan, is totally
| equivalent to saying "English" if you are a native.
|
| This is obviously a not innocent choice. At this level I
| don't believe in coincidences and CatalaLang makes it even
| more obvious. This looks like a veeeery obvious psy-op, or a
| independentist version of the old embrace, extend,
| extinguish.
|
| My bet is that as they can't stomach the basic legal
| concepts, they will try silently replace it by the new
| "updated" meaning of those concepts.
| feliixh wrote:
| Def a psyop. Classic Catalonian move of seizing
| independence by writing self determination laws in code and
| carefully introducing a bug that they can then exploit to
| secede.
| dial9-1 wrote:
| it's catala in catala
| slazaro wrote:
| It's actually "catala" not "catala". Source: I'm catala.
| mkl95 wrote:
| > when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?
|
| Golang will do the trick. Catala lang will not unless the
| language becomes massively popular.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| try catalalang right now behind incognito mode and tell me
| what you get
| mkl95 wrote:
| Touche
| lolinder wrote:
| > when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?
|
| I wouldn't use Go as a good example of naming a language. It
| worked out because the language had the weight of Google
| behind it, but it's still awkward that you have to use a
| different name when searching for things than you do at other
| times.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > I wouldn't use Go as a good example of naming a language.
| It worked out because the language had the weight of Google
| behind it
|
| this is called the no true scotsman fallacy - "I'm still
| right in XYZ case because XYZ isn't a real instance of ABC
| (the thing I'm making a claim about)"
| lolinder wrote:
| No, it's not, because I didn't make a universal claim
| about anything. A _No True Scotsman_ fallacy must follow
| a overly-broad _No Scotsman_ statement.
|
| All I said is that Go, specifically, is an awkward name
| that probably shouldn't be used to justify further
| awkward names.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| >No, it's not, because I didn't make a universal claim
| about anything.
|
| the implicit, categorical, universal, claim you're making
| (that's the crux of this petty, pointless, debate) is
| that the naming matters _at all_. my counterfactual is go
| and your response was that it should be dismissed
| /discounted because blah blah blah. do you see the no
| true scotsman now?
| [deleted]
| mxkopy wrote:
| [flagged]
| azan_ wrote:
| What? Why?
| [deleted]
| version_five wrote:
| The flagged post didn't put it eloquently but the sentiment
| is right, and complaining about naming violates HN rules
| about not complaining about tangential issues. As it is
| they've at least temporarily ruined the discussion by
| having the top post be feigned concern about something
| that's not at all material to the content.
| jrockway wrote:
| This hasn't seemed to help or hurt the popularity of other
| languages. You've got hot beverages, single letters, snakes,
| gemstones, two letter verbs, oxidized steel, languages where
| two thirds of the name are symbols, etc. It doesn't seem to
| matter. It appears that society, and search engines, are well-
| equipped to deal with the concept of homonyms.
| slazaro wrote:
| All of the things you mentioned are not languages themselves.
| If you google "catala language" (try it! seriously) you're
| going to get results for the natural language, not this one.
| It's just an unneeded roadblock that they placed on
| themselves.
| [deleted]
| mrdoob2 wrote:
| Came here to share the same thought.
| chillbill wrote:
| [dead]
| eddtests wrote:
| This is really cool! But I guess it's biggest drawback is being
| unable to deal with case law?
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