The Legal Code

December 31, 2007 in Misc, Politics, Programming | No comments

The accumulation of laws that have been passed over our nation’s history have a striking resemblance to a crufty code base:
  • Dead code → Obsolete laws
  • Bugs in border cases → Legal loopholes
  • Patches and workarounds → Exhibit A: The AMT fiasco
  • Unanticipated side-effects → Pretty much every law ever passed
  • Spaghetti code → Insane cross-references which make reading some statutes almost impossible
The major difference, of course, is that most crufty code bases don’t run people’s lives.