The Bangus Ultimatum

Joel Spolsky writes on the horrors of custom development (as opposed to writing shrinkwrap software). I’ve never written any shrinkwrap software. All the code I’ve churned out is a custom job (in house project, or for a specific client). Guess I’ll never know what I missed. True, you can never achieve economies of scale with custom development, but there’s a unique pleasure to crafting small, personal solutions for actual human beings instead of programming features for a theoretical marketing-defined class of users. Most of lawyering (or so I’ve heard) is a series custom jobs. You have specific cases, and each of them would have to involve a different approach. The closest thing to an off-the-shelf legal “solution” I can think of is Creative Commons, but enforcing the licenses in court is still a custom job.

Still not sure if I’ll pass Taxation 1, but while reviewing for the subject a few weeks back I had perverse pleasure of “mapping” the provisions on income taxation into a flowchart thingie. I know Sir JJ thinks it’s bullshit, but I still imagine a lot of my law subjects as running code. Tax Law just describes this huge system thats exists to process input (your hard-earned money) and converts it into pork (sorry). Negotiable Instruments Law doesn’t describe a single system (that’s why I had trouble charting it linearly), instead it describes a stack of protocols for transfering information (that’s what a check is, in the end- a vehicle for data). Succession, however, is hard. In computer programming, objects are supposed to expire from the memory space, and each programming language has rules that determine how new objects take over resources in an orderly fashion. It’s a hard job doing it manually, that’s why modern web-oriented platforms (Java, .NET) handle all the nitty-gritty memory management automatically nowadays.

(NOTE: I may have to update this once the E-VAT law becomes effective. New rates, and new tax treatment for general professional partnerships)