Hacker News Reader

> While I failed to get 100% of students to enjoy coding

Surely that wasn’t the goal, though it echos the well-intentioned but flawed “everyone should learn to code” initiatives.

You need the right temperament for programming, and some people find it mind-numbing, in the same way I find reading legal documents mind-numbing.

View on HN

"I find reading legal documents mind-numbing"

My wife is a lawyer and I find her capacity to make sense of very complex and large documents quite amazing - particularly as there is no debugger, no unit tests and the execution environment is unpredictable!

I'm not a lawyer, so I might be wrong, but I think one thing that lawyers do is they learn that in a legal sense, documents (and laws) are more about intent and how the various parties understand them. They are not computer code where there is only one correct way to interpret them and where nothing is open to debate. That's why it's hard for computer programmers to read contracts and legal documents, because we try to parse and interpret them like code and very quickly get caught up in minutia that really doesn't matter in the bigger picture that lawyers operate within.

Worth noting that sometimes the minutia do matter - cases have hinged on whether a comma was present:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/16/oxford-comma-h...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com