laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (08/21/83)
Would everybody who is advocating the "all lawyers should be shot" please explain why their difficulties are the result of lawyers rather than an outmoded legal system? I know that the lawyers often get to make the laws, but is that any reason to damn the whole class? Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (08/22/83)
With respect to the claim that lawyers create work for themselves by creating complex laws: Computer programmers create work for themselves, too, by creating complex computer systems that only programmers can understand. Does this mean we are all involved in a conflict of interest and should all be shot? Hardly. It means we just don't know of any simpler way to describe what we want done while retaining the power and flexibility to really get done what we want done. Look at any computer program/system/piece of hardware that is in real production use. It probably started out as a simple idea, then 20 people each wanted a special feature put in to help them get their job done. Many of those special features got put in. As a result, people complain because every key does something in vi; because the "ls -?" command prints the alphabet; because the UNIX manual no longer fits in Rob Pike's briefcase. People are putting up signs at USENIX looking for UNIX hackers to come and work for them. Yet few of us think we really do this to keep ourselves in a secure job. Lawyers have the same problems. They don't invent English the way we invent opcodes and datatypes. They have people who want a law that does "the right thing" for them. (Sound familiar?) So they try to write down some words using a vague natural language (that's a dig on English, not the lawyers) to say what they mean. Others debug it, others debate it, and eventually some of the laws pass. (The big difference is that, since laws affect everybody, there are people fighting them; but programs don't usually affect anybody but the people who use them, and you usually aren't forced to use somebodys program.) To get the behavior they want, without any loopholes, and without screwing anybody, they have to use some complex language and mention lots of special cases. After adding in all the features that everybody wanted, the laws are just as complex as the tty driver. This is not to say that I like lawyers. We have one here that isn't exactly a picnic to deal with. And when you ask one a question, often you'll get an answer that amounts to "I don't know, because there haven't been any court cases on that one". Kind of like debugging a program in a batch environment with a 10 year turnaround time. However, accusing them of a conflict of interest strikes me as comparable to wanting winos off the street to design the Utopia84 programming language, since the programming language experts are going to be the ones to write the compilers!