Beautiful Code

Part of me is a programmer. I am a barely controlled messy in real life but when writing program code I sometimes become a raving maniac that spends hours, days and even weeks on ordering and beautifying his code without adding any functionality.

The German laws add up to 80,000 to 90,000 rules. Every one of this single rules is a multi-word or rather multi-line statement. Yet the organizational complexity of all these rules is very low. Basically all the rules are operating in parallel. Thus people confronted with the laws have to know all the rules if they want to be sure to conform to all of them. This is simply impossible. A law system is ridiculous when it is not enforceable because nobody understands it. The complexity of the German law system is far beyond the point where traditional programming paradigms break down. And these programming paradigms - I am referring to procedural programming - have a higher grade of organization than the German law system.

The rapid development of processing power has taught programmers how to organize rule sets beside which the German rule system looks puny. It is hard but possible to write rule system of the same complexity as the German law system that are intuitive to understand, simple to read and a pleasure to work with. The know how is there, it is just in the wrong positions. Laws should define abstract interfaces. The more than hundred tax laws (tens of thousands of single rules) alone come with almost two hundred forms that dedicated tax payers are supposed to fill out. Imaging using two hundred Internet protocols for transporting different kinds of information (you mostly use two, one for email and one for browsing the world wide web, plus a hand full of protocols for multimedia applications in the world wide web). And all the Internet protocols you use are build on top of a basic protocol. The information revolution would not have been possible if people had not been restricted to a few selected standards and protocols.

Law must learn from this. Part of the problem is the law making process which seems to encourage adding laws rather than removing existing ones. But even if the law were simpler, a complex society probably needs a complex law system. A lot of effort should go into beautifying the laws. In programming beauty is not only beautiful to behold, it also pays off in the long run. It would definitely pay off in laws.