That's a New One:
From Paul Ohm, "the world's first law review article that is also a working computer program." I'm not sure I see the benefit of "computer programming and the law" that isn't already captured by empirical legal studies, but then I have never seen an article with a picture of the top of my head before.
The problem though is that there are certain fields where being "clever" is a bad thing. Computer programming is one of those fields. Arguably the law is another.
Well, I suppose that's not true. I do know such programmers, but they're all terrible bores I wouldn't want to be caught dead with.
And
If not, you get Perl jam, which is like spaghetti code only more hip if more opaque.
The mathematicians let us use their word:
The word is “elegant”.
I agree that a large part of this overlaps with the ELS toolkit, but it's a part of the ELS world that is woefully underdeveloped. ELS-types tend to be statisticians who hire statisticians-who-code as their RAs. Their interesting results tend to focus on stats results--lots of great regressions--while neglecting non-stats advances like natural language processing, network science, search theory, artificial intelligence, etc.
You probably use vi, Hungarian notation, K&R-style bracing, and one-based indexing too. Infidels!
The article itself is not a working computer program, it just contains snippets of Perl code.
You probably use vi . . . Infidels!
Blasphemy! Vi is the most brilliant, elegantly minimalist text editor interface known to man.
And just think how bad it would be if legislation came out of this. Resistance is called for.
(Sorry, Paul. I'm sure you've heard all that before.)
Yes. I have.
In college, while getting CS and EE degrees, everybody made jokes and puns. Even the professors.
In law school, I kid not, the only person I met who ever mentioned it was my Copyright prof, Eugene Volokh. He dressed me down one day for not having registered ohmslaw.com
Once I moved to Boulder, Colorado, home of the many Tibetan prayer flags and Bikram studios, I started getting the Yoga reference about 10x more often than the EE reference.
Did you look at the preface? Are you making a semantic distinction about literate programming? It isn't object code, but it's definitely source code--just a preprocessor step away.
(And before others flame me, I admit that footnote 7 is a bit of a regrettable cop out, but a necessary cop out if I wanted to get this thing published. When this finally goes to press, I'll put the original noweb files up at paulohm.com under "Code".)
Hate to pile on, but perhaps you might enjoy this shirt: Resistance is Futile.
In "normal" programming, a source code file contains the code itself, which is intended to be run by a computer, as well as comments, which are intended to be read by a human. The code comprises the majority of the file; comments are interspersed here and there, set off by special punctuation that instructs the computer to ignore them.
(Comments in a program are somewhat analogous to obiter dicta in a court opinion: explanatory, but not binding. They help a human reader understand what the code is intended to do, but they do not affect its actual operation.)
The notion of "literate programming" was devised by esteemed computer scientist Donald Knuth. A literate program file is chiefly a natural-language (e.g. English) description of the program's logic, with code itself set off by special punctuation. So rather than surrounding comments with special punctuation that tells the computer to ignore them, the programmer surrounds code with special punctuation telling the computer to read it.
The idea is an elaboration of Knuth's more general notion that computer programs be written primarily as a way of communicating ideas to human readers, and only secondarily as instructions to an actual computer. This notion is much more accepted in the academic field of computer science research than it is in industry. Concomitantly, literate programming is mostly found in research, and not so frequently in software engineering.
I'm not sure the world is ready for programming lawyers.
Oddly, I know at least two people with both a law degree and a graduate degree in computer science. It's an odd combination.
I like what Kernigan said about clever code.... To paraphrase:
The problem with writing clever code is that you have to be more clever to debug it. Since you can never be more clever than yourself, it is generally unmaintainable.
Most of the software engineers I work with use the word "clever" as an insult.
However, Ohm has shown by his comments that he must be a member of the Church of EMACS and therefore probably a follower of St, IGNUcious. Infidel!
Although Ohm's Law is why one can't get electrocuted with a car battery, or was that why getting electrocuted with a car battery would violate the 8th Amendment. I forget....
There's a great deal to be said for writing a book with a text editor
rather than a word processor. See, e.g.,
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html.
Yes, I follow the teachings of the church. VI is the number of the beast.
I've written a 500+ line elisp program for reading and annotating law review articles--can't do that in vi!
But, I'm prepared to confess my deepest secret: being a law professor for four years now, I tend to do most of my productive work in MS Word! Wow...feels good to type that outloud. I'm Paul, and I use Word.
:wq
:qw
:q!
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