[orwin]

I use to love "code is law" when i was an engineering student. Then i worked in the real world, and discovered how dumb i was. Code is code, it's flawed, it's bugged, it's old and very hard to update to account for new reality, it cannot account for all edgecase in projects with much easier rules than "law", and ultimately, an unaccountable engineer with no real stakes in the result (except maybe employment, which until 2024 was _not_ a real stake) has the last word.

[OutOfHere]

The shoddy "engineering" that you're used to in the business world is not actually proper engineering; it never was.

Consider cryptocurrencies and smart contracts -- they work perfectly fine with millions of transactions daily, all executed by perfectly correct code -- that's real engineering. Mature programming languages also are good examples of real engineering.

Of course everything needs updates to account for edge cases, but tackling these correctly only makes the engineering more sound, not less sound.

In the real world, the selective application of law commonly is more likely to take away rights than to grant rights.