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by tarmstrong 3476 days ago
There are regulations that affect the work of software engineers. PCI DSS is one that I am familiar with. Perhaps unfortunately, if your software interacts with the real world (like payments infrastructure), you have to heed regulation. This tends not to affect people who are casually writing software or working on many open source projects, but it does impact large companies like Google.

(I like to think of this as pretty similar to the Haskell IO monad. At some point you have to break out of your cozy side-effect free code and actually do something. At that point you have to deal with the messy real world.)
2 comments
EvanAnderson 3476 days ago
PCI DSS isn't regulation. It's a standard promulgated by a private LLC (the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council).

HIPAA would be a much better example of regulation that is material w/ respect to software development.

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tarmstrong 3476 days ago
Great point. Thanks!
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codygman 3476 days ago
> (I like to think of this as pretty similar to the Haskell IO monad. At some point you have to break out of your cozy side-effect free code and actually do something. At that point you have to deal with the messy real world.)

And Haskell is excellent for dealing with the aforementioned messy real world. Better than any of the previous languages (for 1000+ loc) I've worked with.

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