There’s probably a deep vein of thought around how legalese resembles code. Terms of service often start by defining variables, and concepts are often expanded inline to avoid ambiguity.
If you could strip away the defensiveness of the legal language describing a service, and reduce it to the precise description of what the thing does, I think you’d get a valuable result.
Not every product can be fully open-source. But I think more products should be “open pattern-language”.
GDPR-driven privacy policies get us closer to this vision. Today, you’ll often see detailed descriptions of what sub-service-providers are used, and where data is stored.
If you take this a few steps further, apply some standardization, and really take transparency to heart, I think you end up with a more natural way to build software.
In the future, I’d like to see software development transform into something that looks more like this:
- Humans write up terms and policies using a pattern language resembling legalese.
- Machines generate most of the code, and humans apply styling and finishing touches.