|
|
|
|
|
|
by dctoedt
6271 days ago
|
|
|
The courtroom-code analogy is spot on. Convoluted contract language usually comes from not having a lot of time to put together a draft; the result is often the lawyer equivalent of spaghetti code. Trust me, lawyers and judges hate reading such contracts as much as anyone, just as programmers hate having to maintain someone else's hurriedly-drafted spaghetti code. |
|
|
I spent some time at a gov't subcontractor and the copy-paste version of cya was clear as day. Sometimes you'd see where search/replace failed and there would be other program names.
It was a mess and I'm fairly certain it was because of our size. Fighting a contract in court is an expensive and potentially reputation damaging prospect, so if you have significantly less resources at your disposal it is very likely that you won't be able to fight the baked in vagueness and contradiction.