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Re:The Healthcare Diff by azm on Saturday March 13, 2010 @12:25AM (#1188537)
Neat use of development tools to illustrate a point. But, to be quite blunt, very naive in the best case and quite stupid in the worst case. We can "ship early, iterate often" in software because quite often it doesn't cost much (certainly a naive way of putting it) to do so. However that paradigm breaks down even in software when dealing with things like enterprise software or say medical device software or FDA approved software. Guess what would happen if the large scale infrastructure construction industry went with this model?

Think about what it costs for an organization to adapt to a new set of regulations. A boatload of new paperwork needs to be setup, ordered, printed and distributed, after a thorough analysis of the regulations and a whole long process to determine documentary requirements. If software or electronic records are used, those need to be updated. The new set of rules need to be communicated to a large number of participating health care providers with appropriate document and/or software updates. Each of those things needs to be audited and certified. Personnel have to be trained to understand and comply to the new set of regulations and potentially certified. There would be a period of enforcement where nobody will quite understand the limits and those limits would be tested and the legal system would then clarify those regulations.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. In such cases the massive one-shot refactor gives you way more bang for the buck than not.

Re:The Healthcare Diff by chrischen on Saturday March 13, 2010 @05:14AM (#1188765)
They should write the bill in a programming language instead of English. Then it won't be so tough to interpret it. :)
Re:The Healthcare Diff by kgrin on Saturday March 13, 2010 @09:43AM (#1188938)
They do... what you see there in the "4,000 page" bill is legislative language - pretty clear code for a lawyer or legislative aide. On the other hand, the Congressional Research Service puts out some pretty good nonpartisan "plain-language" bill summaries (and for anyone who asks "well why don't they just use those the laws themselves", ask yourself "why don't you just write code in English" - they both have the potential for ambiguity).

Incidentally, I put "4,000 page" in quotes because it's a pet peeve... if you actually look at the text, it's in 24pt font and giant margins - makes it much easier to read and mark up around a table, but in no way approximates the amount of text people envision when you say "X-thousand pages".

Re:The Healthcare Diff by chrischen on Saturday March 13, 2010 @08:21PM (#1190033)
Yea but if you compile it, wouldn't it be faster than being interpreted? And the interpretor is also a human brain, which is much more error prone than a computer.