Re: Hackers and Painters and Lawyers

[Matt Hellige <address@hidden>]

[Paul Steckler <steck@ccs.neu.edu>]
> > >     All in all, legal drafting looks a lot like software reuse.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, via cut and paste, rather than standard libraries.
> 
> 'Twould be nice if one could replace several paragraphs of 
> legal boilerplate with
> 
>   (insert-usual-cya-stuff-here)

This is something of a tangent, but not too off-topic, I think...
Some of you are probably familiar with this, but maybe it'll be new to
some people... Simon Peyton Jones recently spent some time thinking
about domain-specific languages for financial contracts:

http://www.research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/contracts-icfp.htm

One of the co-authors of the paper started a company around the idea:

http://www.lexifi.com/ 

It's neat stuff, especially if you like combinators!

Matt

-- 
Matt Hellige                  matt@immute.net
http://matt.immute.net