I've worked on a variety of large UK government systems for the past ten years.
This blog encapsulates the problem of writing government services/software, which often results in strange outcomes.
Writing software for government is essentially the codification of centuries worth of Acts of Parliament.
Now imagine building the HMPO passport system, and then some underlying Law/Act is changed or repealed etc.
Now someone has to find and change everything that the Law/Act affected in all systems.
Now consider that the government frequently outsources this work to expensive consultancies who are motivated to elongate contracts and extract maximum value from the client... And ideally become entrenched.
All whilst building systems of varying quality and inflexibility so that the next time that a Law/Act is changed then this whole process repeats.
There is no central decision making authority to wrangle this problem (there used to be Spend Controls), which is why Government services delivery is so expensive.
Do you have any insight as to why, seemingly, there is no contractual obligation on contractors to make a working system. They seem to make something approximating a working system, vastly overcharge -- like x1000 -- for output that appears to be 3 months of work by one junior programmer, but then get paid as if the system actually worked.
> Do you have any insight as to why, seemingly, there is no contractual obligation on contractors to make a working system.
Often, you'll find that procurement is handled by someone working off of an incomplete set of written specifications. The procurement officer probably has no expertise with or informal knowledge of the problem to identify problems in advance, and even if they do legal requirements (ironically designed to ensure fair and transparent procurement) might force them to disregard informal knowledge over the formal specifications.
After the contract is signed, sunk cost fallacies and optimism biases take over. If the project goes over budget it might be easier to cut back on features than admit failure or demand more money, and the project will go over budget once real users start seeing the in-progress work and change requests pile up. Project managers want to be seen managing a successful project; nobody's rewarded for being the first to predict failure.
This is a kind of principal/agent problem that the private sector partially manages with equity or deferred compensation, but the profit motive has a very limited role in government and you'd probably not want to give stock options anyway. Beyond that, even the political overlords have short time horizons of 'the next election', and announcing a grand new project is almost as good as delivering one.
> This is a kind of principal/agent problem that the private sector partially manages with equity or deferred compensation
The private sector also has the option (and usually the motivation) to just quietly disappear failed projects.
Wal-Mart buys an automation system for their distribution centre and it's a huge success? Tell the stock market. The system is a complete failure, we remove it and trash it? Uhhhh of course the secrets of our highly efficient warehouses are commercially confidential, couldn't possibly tell the stock market what we did or did not do.
It benefits no one to acknowledge that months were spent and the only outcome is millions of dollars wated. Sure, they could try to hold the contractor accountable, but that would put them at risk of being held accountable themselves by their own superiors for hiring that contractor in the first place. So they pretend everything works great, and pay accordingly
There's often no one to make them accountable. With a building, people know that having a supervisor that's not from the contracted company is valuable, but this hasn't caught on in software.
Three reasons, no incentives, no competition and no fraud.
Unlike in private companies, government employees are often very hard to fire, even if they tragically underperform. If your salary does not depend at all on your performance, you play by the book, follow the rules and don't particularly care about putting in good work. You have no incentives to do so. It doesn't matter how the contractor you picked performs, as long as they can't prove negligence on your part, you're not getting fired. You won't be promoted either, even if they deliver under budget and months before the deadline.
In a private company, the owner wants to make money, so there's an incentive to perform. Underperforming employees (or even entire departments) are simply cut. If a company fails at this too badly (all companies fail to some extend), the entire company underperforms and loses customers. Ultimately, the market ensures that companies grow if they're good at this and shrink if they aren't.
With governments, this is, again, not the case. You aren't going to switch to a competing passport system and drive this one out of the market, no matter how badly it sucks. Metrics won't change much, no matter how bad the UX is, as the system provides a critical service which has no alternative. This is the no competition problem.
Private companies also have more freedom to pick contractors. It's really bad PR for the government if their employees choose contractors through nepotism, so laws have been passed that standardize the contractor selection process. This means that, even if you know a contractor is not the right choice, you may be prevented from doing anything about this. Because al rules can be gamed, most government contracts are won by companies who know how to game the rules, not those who make good software and would be chosen by a knowledgeable employee. This is the no fraud problem.
Oh dear - you should European Funds for CS research programs. It’s a money making scheme for everyone involved without producing anything of substance and runs for years on end. There even companies “specialized” in every step of the process.
I recently renewed my passport in France. There is a new-ish platform here for every document one might want to obtain. I had one form to complete online, that was rather easy to follow. I then had to go to the office once to finish the process. That took only 10 minutes and then the passport was delivered. As painless as can be, I believe.
Whatever the situation is in the UK, it is not hopeless. The government needs to stop being afraid of hiring actual employees and bring all development in-house.
There was a group of people under the gov.uk banner who were actually really good. But a challenge is that if you employ someone, you need to fit them into your grade structure. And decent programmers earn “Senior Civil Servant” figures.
While renewing a passport is one of the easiest things you can do, I distinctively remember it taking a good half-day (most of which is waiting in line jumping from one desk to another until you find someone that can check all the documents you provided are satisfactory and sign off for you).
Now however, if it's not a renewal but a new application, the difficulty sharply increases.
Even Germany has this figured out. Getting a new passport just required me to make an appointment, fill out an online form and go to the appointment with a single person. The only document I needed was my personal ID. Took like 15 minutes, not including the wait before I was called up. I feel like if Germany can get its shit together, any other country can too.
If you're applying for your very first personal ID, then you need to bring a birth certificate and another adult who already has an ID, but it's also something that's been trivial to do for years now.
Is there an opportunity for reusable OSS rule systems? It seems that every government at every level could use an expressive system for defining and versioning them.
I suspect part of the gap here is, as you note, everything technical is outsourced and so there is not enough institutional capacity to envision and execute what would be a quite revolutionary re-architecture.
I find it extremely frustrating that the government is able to spend tens of millions on contractors for an IT project, but can’t pay market rate for in-house engineers, even if those would be cheaper in the long run.
Yes, absolutely. Although that would require care and forethought regarding unintended consequences.
Most roads will lead back to consultancies stepping-in because the government org will likely lack the skills. And it's very easy for a consultancy to claim they're experts, but throw an army of graduates at it.
Interoperability between rules based systems (and legacy) software need to be considered too. It's a massive problem that will grow with time... Most government departments have some form of every generation of technology.
This problem of law being essentially an append only repository of amendments is not unique to the UK.
I'd be cool to have a system that just needs to be fed "patches" in an append only way instead of having to scatter exceptions (if branches) all around.
Some logic programming languages can do that a little bit, but I think that the real problem is that there's no tech debt budget, and lawyers working around the laws can also profit from things being complicated. It'd be cool to have people devoted to simply laws to keep things as simple as possible.
I used to work in Spend Controls in Cabinet Office, so I got to see this across about 20 UK Government departments.
It's a bit of a race to the bottom regarding outsourcing, there are good companies and there are good technologist's but they never last more than a few years due to poor contracts, poor decision-making and poor pay.
I've actually seen some very good companies deliver on time and under budget, but then the company fails because they did the job too well and follow-up work wasn't needed.
I think that for outsourcing companies "wage theft" and doing just enough to meet the contract are core components of their business. That is, they need to optimise for high fees, low pay and the bare-minimum in quality.
Haskell has an interesting syntax: it is intuitive after someone explains it to me, but not intuitive much before the explanation.
I don't think it's because I'm used to Algol-based languages (C, Python, etc.). Every Haskell code I've seen is plagued with a plethora of operators which aim to make the code concise but it's not obvious what they do just by looking at them: https://academy.fpblock.com/haskell/tutorial/operators/
At some point, I did a rough count, and the number of operators you encounter in "normal" Haskell code—avoiding lens or domain-specific libraries—was pretty close to the number of operators you'd encounter in, say, JavaScript. This was a while ago and I don't want to redo the exercise now, but, even if we're being generous to JavaScript, practical Haskell needs on the order of 2x as many operators as practical JavaScript, not 10x.
Haskell has some up-front incidental complexity, but it's a difference of degree not kind from popular starting languages. It's easy to underestimate how much you had to learn about Algol-style languages that you've just internalized so well that you don't even realize. I've taught some complete programming beginners (high or middle schoolers) Java and Python and, especially one-on-one, I've seen how they get confused by things I did not even remember required explanation!
For example, in Python, people put : in the wrong place and don't understand how = works. "Basic" syntax like : and = are far more complex than we realize, we've just learned the basics so well that it's second nature. It's similar to how native English speakers don't even realize we have rules for adjective order ("big red ball" vs "red big ball"), while language learners run into it like a brick wall.
I don't know if you just counted the JavaScript operators but if you count all the instances where some random symbol is used then it's really a ton. There is
yield*
function*
a?.b?.c
function f(x = 3) {
x ??= 3
...
TypeScript adds even more:
a!.b
Type<T>
type A = B extends C ? D : E
...
and there are countless ECMA proposals and TypeScript feature request that want to pile on even more. People seem to have zero qualms about cryptic syntax. I think the difference is that this syntax is mostly very ad-hoc. If you know the language already, this just adds a liiiittle bit extra to solve some very specific problem. On the other hand, Haskell operators like <$>, <*>, >>= are extremely general. After years I still learn about new and unexpected ways that you can use them (e.g. what the hell is `fix <$> id`). But paradoxically, because they can be used in so many seemingly unrelated contexts, you have no idea what to use them for at all initially.
I think that’s true as far as it goes, but there are further reasons why Haskell is more difficult. Here is one:
In Haskell, the lack of parentheses for function calls plus currying means that to read a function call, you need to already know how many arguments the function takes, which I feel adds a new level of difficulty over languages where you can often guess what a function does based on its name, without looking it up.
As a result, often Haskell reads more like math, where without knowing each symbol’s definition, you’re lost.
> the lack of parentheses for function calls plus currying means that to read a function call, you need to already know how many arguments the function takes
While I agree with the general sentiment of what you are saying, note that the syntax has nothing to do with it, it is purely about Haskell using currying excessively. The syntactic translation between Haskell and JS is straight-forward and 1-1:
f x y z -> f(x)(y)(z)
f x (y,z) w -> f(x)(y,z)(w)
I agree that excessive currying is not great, and generally push for non-curried arguments unless a curried form realy is used in practice. But for this to really be comfortable, and to still enjoy all the hgiher-order programming that's nice with Haskell, we would need good records (strucural, anonymous, extensible), which it doesn't really have right now, so we are stuck with currying.
Yes, you could write the same thing, but defaults and language conventions matter. Writing curried functions in JavaScript is awkward enough that nobody does it by default. If you did, people would ask why in a review.
> practical Haskell needs on the order of 2x as many operators as practical JavaScript, not 10x.
Yeah but the JavaScript operators are almost all universally understood. There are some exceptions and mistakes, like `===` which shouldn't exist, and `.?` which is new but fairly standard. But most of the operators are just standard maths stuff, normal array/field accesses, etc.
Haskell has normal operators plus a bunch of weird operators that you need to learn. Even if the raw number of operators is only 2x, the number of operators that you have to learn is probably 10x.
Especially when you consider that Javascript operators are fixed so you have to learn them once, whereas Haskell operators are user-defined and Haskell programmers love defining them.
Oh, I owe a lot to freenode and #haskell and #math in particular. I remember one of them ran a lecture on category theory, live. It was also there I first heard about Martin-Löf type theory.
It was such a great time and place for a young person interested in learning about Haskell.
no doubt its fashionable to think "perl == line noise == bad"
however, there are certain sub languages (slangs) where the use of punctuation chars as operators is very helpful, of course regex is the most compelling where the code is parsing one char at a time
my regex url {
^ # Start of line
[<http> s? '://'] # Match http or https
['www.' ]? # Optional www.
[<[\w\-]>+ '.' ]+ # One or more domain segments
<[a..z]> ** 2..6 # TLD, 2 to 6 lowercase letters
[ '/' <[\w\-./?%&=]>* ]? # Optional path/query
$ # End of line
}
imo raku has improved the situation a lot by introducing "regex 2.0" with deep support for unicode and with built in grammars that can work smoothly with regex
ok - I agree that there was a culture of golfing and obscurity in some sections of the perl coder base
it was inevitable that a simpler language - Python - would take the big slice of scripters who wanted something easier to learn and to read
I'm sad that perl no longer has a credible niche for script level coders who want to learn a more powerful and more expressive language than Python ...
Most of the operators in that link are bog standard, and among the least interesting things to say about Haskell.
If I didn't know programming and picked at random some Java program, I wouldn't understand much either. If I didn't take a single math course and I tried to read a math formula, I wouldn't understand the operators or anything either.
The standard should be: how much can you understand once you learn the basics and do a couple of tutorials?
> it is intuitive after someone explains it to me, but not intuitive much before the explanation
Isn't that pretty close to what something being intuitive means? Ie. something being intuitive means that it's easily understood or learned without requiring prior knowledge or instruction.
With Haskell code it is often so that the code which actually does something is expressed in terms of combinators. These combinators are often very general, so one must do a bit of mental work to understand what they do in this particular context.
Once you understand what the combinators do in a particular context the code often reads very easily, and what it does is very intuitive and natural.
Best example I can think of is applicative parsers, where there are scattered <*> and <$> operators around, but if you just ignore them the parser just looks like a very intuitive description of what the expressions you want to parse look like.
I think Larry Wall mentioned something like this regarding perl. Things can only be intuitive after learning them. I do not think it is syntax you are complaining about either. Some constructs in Haskell reference a certain model (monads, lenses) and no syntax is going to infuse any reader with that knowledge if they do not possess it already.
I love this. It starts as a parody, then slowly morphs into a serious and elegant solution to the "game". By the end, I almost wish I could play it myself. Bravo.
I had to do a MN1 application for my US-born daughter as both me and my partner were born abroad. As OP alludes to this is a sort of side quest called "registration" which if you don't do it before the child is 18 lapses (although I think there are still routes to obtain citizenship in these circs).
The most difficult part of the process (not dealt with in this version of Passport Application but maybe a future DLC pack?) was actually finding someone who could certify my evidence (you are meant to submit originals but they keep the docs including passports for 3-6 months which is a bit unrealistic if you are living abroad). I can't remember the exact rules but it wasn't possible to use a US notary or a normal solicitor certification process and instead I needed to go to a council office.
After calling about 5 councils all of whom disavowed any knowledge of the process or its requirements I ended up finding someone at Islington Council who was delightfully helpful. But it was one of the more frustrating UK government interactions I've had.
For the benefit of anyone else doing this in Japan, these are the documents I had to submit. It will be different depending on circumstance, in particular I think the author may also be born outside the UK which may require other/more documents.
Anyway I had to submit:
Certified copy of my birth certificate, order from the UK general register office.
Original (not photocopy) of Japanese family register and translation.
Certificate of acceptance of notification of birth, original and translation.
Original Marriage certificate and translation.
Colour photocopy of every page of my childs Japanese passport.
Copy photocopy of the passport of an American or British citizen who confirms that child is mine.
The process is pretty unclear, and in general you seem to have to just keep submitting documents until they are satisfied.
If you don't have a legal father then you can't claim British citizenship through your father. That's all pretty straightforward. (Although there's a fun case where you can claim citizenship by double descent because your ancestor wasn't able to claim citizenship because of sexist historical laws).
Weirdly this never came up for me (and I'm in a similar situation). I suspect what documents are ask for varies a lot by who is assessing the application.
That’s interesting, no requirement for parental birth certificates?
I was asked to provide (I am British, wife is Hungarian, living in Hungary) both parents’ birth certificates and all four grandparents’ birth certificates.
My wife is not in touch with her father, so we had to submit a cover letter explaining the situation, which was accepted (although I don’t really see why it was relevant anyway, my son’s Britishness is derived from my Britishness, her nationality and the nationality of her parents is essentially irrelevant).
We also didn’t have to copy the passport of anyone else, but we did have to have a family friend do the confirmation online (family friend is a lawyer in the UK, so was on the list of approved jobs for this).
In my case, as a British citizen married to a European living outside the UK, I had way fewer requests/demands for documentation.
All I needed to do was submit my own details, and a copy of both the marriage certificate and birth certificate for the child.
The assumption was made that as a married couple the child had me as the father, and as I'm British then so were they.
No references at all to grandparents, or even the mother's details, in the online wizard I filled out. Quite a quick process, which reminds me I probably need to renew their UK passport since it has expired a couple of years back.
> although I don’t really see why it was relevant anyway, my son’s Britishness is derived from my Britishness, her nationality and the nationality of her parents is essentially irrelevant
This is essentially happened to me, the "75% of the initial doc requests turned out to be irrelevant" was referring to this sort of thing.
Don't know in this case, but some other countries ask for it to deduce your travel history (any current passport itself goes to them, with color copies of every page of old passports). Qatar wanted it because I shared name with somebody born 40 years before me.
I just looked it up. I was dating a Qatari and didn't even dare to explore naturalization. The process is insane. As a man, you can't get citizenship through marriage (only women get that). So, as a guy I would have to live there for 25 continuous years with little time outside the country. Add on that they require you to be rich, Muslim and speak Gulf Arabic at native level. Also, you have to give up your birth citizenship (not always possible) and they can revoke your citizenship on a whim.
Another reason is that the UK forbids the child to have different names on their japanese passport and their UK passport, which is often (almost always?) the case
Not only can you complete a UK Passport Application completely online (save for mailing any required documentations to HMPO), you can apply for a brand new passport as a "new" citizen (by adoption, naturalisation, or descent), online, from outside the UK, with just a mobile device without downloading some special app, including taking the photos.
Sure, you can play it on "hard mode " and do it with paper and pen for the lulz, but my experience was extremely efficient, fast, and straight-forward.
I went through the UK online passport renewal system last year, and it is the best website I have used in a very very long time. A real breath of fresh air. It worked perfectly on my old computer and 'ancient' browser. Everything very simple / accessible / clear, colours, text, buttons, fields, requirements. A simple step-by-step navigation and actually friendly.
It is a shame that more businesses dont care about their customers enough to invest in such a well designed website. Well done HMPO.
You can easily tell the difference between services built under GDS, where the work favoured local contractors and agencies and otherwise smaller outfits, and those farmed out to the usual huge consultancy firms that are typically mired in controversy.
I would have much, much lower expectations for a body shop like Infosys or Accenture or Thoughtworks. They probably wouldn’t implement the design system right without billing extra for attention to detail.
I agree, I also renewed my passport recently and the website and process is quite smooth. It's the more complex cases, first requests from abroad, etc., that lack automation.
Seconded! In my experience, Gov.UK does pretty well in general and am happy to say that as one who privately fumes about various aspects of Britain in recent years.
Renewed recently which was my first time using the online system. The entire process was exceptionally fast. I got the passport back in less than 2 weeks from California.
In comparison my Canadian passport renewal (damaged after 3 years) from California took 4 months. Was entirely paper based and had ridiculous requirements such as requiring a reference and a photograph stamped by photographer.
I know there's a digital pilot that's ongoing. That should be rolled out ASAP.
Just being able to do it via mail sounds like luxury, to renew a Swedish passport you need to visit an embassy in person. And then in 2 weeks go back in person to pick it up. Really fun when the embassy is on the other side of the country and it means expensive plane trips. This was even more of a problem during
COVID when borders were closed, since Sweden doesn't have embassies in every single country.
And they expire in 5 years, not 10 like many other countries.
I need to renew my Belgian passport soon, and I live in the United States.
Even though the consulate has my biometric data, I need to visit them in person.
My only saving grace is that they sometimes visit my city., and I can register there. But that registration is only valid for 1 year, and they don't visit every year...
And that is still 2h+ one way of travel for me, for something they already have.
You make it seem much simpler than it is in reality. I accept the process for renewals has been streamlined with considerable success but, as someone who recently helped a friend apply for his first passport a couple of years ago, I can attest the process is drawn out and tedious. An in-person interview is required, as is a signature from a 'responsible person' that many people do not have access to (Doctors are not accepted, for instance).
I too have enjoyed a game of *Passport Application* by proxy.
One of the interesting rules the OP doesn't appear to mention is the 'mutable history' rule. Herein, the facts contained in a single document can alter over even short periods of time requiring that a document, already scanned into the Examiners system of fact recording, can be required to be returned for subsequent scans. Verifying documents have not altered in their facts is, some say, tacit acknowledgement by the Examiner breed that a multiverse exists.
The communication channel between the "NPC" telephone agents and the Examiners appears to be somewhat akin to prayer, only vague inferences can truly be received.
Aside, I suspect the OP maybe be a Mornington Crescent aficianado; a game seemingly similar in rule-topology to the aforementioned Passport Application.
Yes and in the British system names can be fluid, changed at will with no declarations being made. That’s how my mother was able to register my birth with the surname of her mother’s third (!) marriage. Birth certificates are also immutable in certain ways but not entirely everything on it is immutable.
Not to mention the passport office has forgotten previous decisions for my own passport where this sort of surname discrepancy has been explained away. (Including one passport where I am listed on a page of her passport!)
The NPCs are infuriating. I called, emailed and received a different answer every time. It was like a poor LLM.
After applying I had to explain to my mother that within the same batch of applications, one daughter required additional UK documents but the other one didn’t (the passport came), purely because one was born in the UK and the other one wasn’t. She rightly flipped out, raised it with an MP and it was resolved within a day.
Similarly for us, siblings each required different treatment. Even when part of the same application. All born in the same UK hospital to the same parents and having the same home address. Fun.
It was interesting to speculate what exactly the one child whose passport came months later had done that warranted the Examiner's extra scrutiny. Something to do with reincarnation I expect.
I just went through hell this with one of my daughters. She was born in Japan and I had a hard time getting my mother’s surname matching what was on my birth certificate.
Long story short, I demonstrated I was born in England and that I have citizenship (a passport) so no matter the possibility, it must be something that can be passed on. That doesn’t match the guidelines of documents required but it’s much less of a pain I reckon.
> What are the base cases? A base case is an ancestor whose Britishness does not depend on a parent, e.g. someone who was naturalised, or born in the UK before 1983 (which makes one unconditionally british regardless of parents). That's right, further into the future we get from 1983, the taller these call-stacks can get.
This is insane to me, coming from a country that simply has a central database of all citizens and foreign residents, and a citizenship check is probably something like a single SELECT on an SQL table.
Despite being born in the UK to a British father my character wasn't previously British due to parents being unmarried and being born after 1983 but before the 2006 rules update.
I'm not totally sure when but I think some time in the 2010s the 2006 update became retroactive so my character was allowed to play. Didn't have to do too many side quests - the main one was retrieving father's birth certificate.
My character also had to attend the endgame ceremony and swear allegiance to the queen, which seemed odd for someone born in the country and lived here all his life
It's not "quite expensive" if you compare it to the Australian passport which is 2x as expensive and so notoriously badly bound, holders joke Australian Border Protection forces test for forgeries by checking if the blue cover curls: if not, it's a fake.
The Australian passport curl was so disappointing. I have a decade-old passport from my third-world country of origin, and that was in far better shape than my new Australian passport that was freshly delivered.
I have noticed in Japan the crazy bureaucratization of document applications in the 7-8 years I've been living here. I've had 2 Japanese documents expire, "MyNumber" and "Driving License" in these years, and when trying to re-obtain them the process has become MUCH more complex. I'm bad at remembering all these processes in detail, but these are from memory:
- For the mynumber, first time, it was a simple application, and maybe a trip or two to the City Hall. This was at a moment where Japan was trying everyone to have/use the mynumber system so that might've made it easier on purpose.
- The second time I needed to book an appointment to request the application forms, which were (snail)mailed to me so then I could apply for the card. Yes, that sentence is as bad as it reads.
Now the crazier one is the driving license (conversion process):
- The first time I needed to get a translation, I went to JAL, showed my documents and paid, then received the translation. Took that and 2-3 documents, went to the driving license center, and gave the documents and passports and IDs. Waited few hours and had it done. Oh, I also got the Motorbike license for free.
- The second time I am applying now: need to get the translation, first register online for the translation, for which you need to create an account and a 8-step process. Hard, but still doable [1]. Then you need to book a meeting for the driving license center. But it's very hard to do so, in fact I couldn't find the link at all. I went in person and they showed me a QR code for the booking, I suspect this is hard to find on purpose. Every place is full and cannot be booked, except for 1 of them, 2 months later. Okay, I try to apply. First basic questions, sure, then asks for travel history on my passport that I need to input manually. Note that dates in one part of the form are on the shape of `YYYYMMDD` and in other they are 3 fields of "YYYY", "MM", "DD" (3 different inputs), having to write a dozen of them is maddening. Oh wait, but if I want the motorbike one, which was automatic before, I now need a document from the Spanish embassy as well, another side quest. I'm hoping they can at least provide it in Japanese. I guess I'm halfway that process now, got a meeting booked 2 months later.
Ha! I go to Japan every now and then, as I have friends there, and I've though a couple times about doing the Japanese driving license thing, that looked super easy back at the time (translate your current driving license, book a meeting in the exam center, do a short exam, and you're almost good to go). I was thinking about doing it in my next trip in two weeks, but seems like they've raised the difficulty several levels :)
if you drive on the right at home, they will fail you the first time on principle. If you drive on the left (aus, brit) you have a chance to pass the first time.
AFAIK this is only available for residents? People traveling can/should use the international driving permit. Both JAL (translation) and the center itself asked me for my resident card.
> do a short exam
Oh there's no exam needed at least! Unless you mean the eye test?
It’s not, you can get a Japanese driving license without living here
; but the government is making some noises to cut back on that (some recent semi-notable accidents caused by foreigners).
It’s apparently been a loophole for Chinese and Vietnamese tourists to get a license that is more recognized abroad then their own.
I think restricting this to residents makes sense; I’m more wary of making it more complex or difficult in other ways, but I also have that quest behind me so I don’t really care to be fair.
As to exam - that depends entirely as to where your “original” driving license is from.
Some countries just need a sufficient amount of paperwork (which sometimes is more difficult than the exam), some require just a theory exam, some require both theory and practical exam. In case of the US, it also differs state by state, because of course it does; why would anything ever make sense.
The "Spaniard" was mostly for reference, as right now I can't remember who sent me the information about the exams, so it might not apply to Europe or Spain.
But the documents required (at least previously to recent changes) for the license transfer were [0]:
1. Application form for Japanese Translation of foreign driver’s license
2. A driver’s license (original, in principle)
3. A photocopy of a residence card or a resident record etc [...] only required for licenses written in Arabic or Russian and licenses issued in certain countries[...]
And it didn't mention any residence documents. I don't know how that works today...
This is one of many reasons why America's birthright citizenship is an incredible optimization: most people can prove they are American with a single document, a birth certificate.
Back in the 2000s, the Justice Department prosecuted someone for a terrorist offense. They researched their birth and found out their parents were technically diplomats of a foreign country.
It was a weird case, because the parents hadn’t actually been working for the foreign embassy for a while, and didn’t know they still held diplomatic status when their daughter was born.
They had entered the US as diplomats and shortly after decided to go local. That was probably their plan all along - lots of diplomats from third world countries do that.
It was a huge shock.
Kind of a “surprise, you’re not actually a citizen, even though both your parents and all your siblings are!”
My First Reaction: Given that the game can be read as a deconstruction of the concept of Nation States and Citizenship, why would the UK government run such a thing?
There was a law change about European Union citizens settlement scheme last week. It's a UK law which is like a tutorial for getting to play the passport game. Anyway, the following was written this year. It starts off by checking if you are a Lisp interpreter:
Changes to Appendix EU
APP EU1. In Annex 1, in sub-paragraph (a) of the definition of ‘continuous qualifying period’, after “(b)(i)(ee) below”, insert “(or unless sub- paragraph (b)(i)(ii) below applies)”.
APP EU2. In Annex 1, for sub-paragraph (b)(i)(ii) of the definition of ‘continuous qualifying period’, substitute:
“(ii) (where the person has limited leave to enter or remain granted under paragraph EU3 or EU3A of this Appendix) any period(s) of absence which did not exceed a total of 30 months in the most recent 60-month period, as at the date of application or (as the case may be) at the date on which, under paragraph EU4, the Secretary of State is considering whether to grant them indefinite leave to enter or remain under paragraph EU2 or (as the case may be) EU2A, without a valid application under this Appendix having been made; or
(jj) any period of absence due directly to an order or decision to which sub-paragraph (b)(iii) below refers, where that order or decision has been set aside or revoked; or”.
APP EU3. In Annex 1, for sub-paragraph (c)(v) of the definition of ‘continuous qualifying period’, substitute:
“(v) a relevant reference is concerned; or
(vi) sub-paragraph (b)(i)(ii) above applies, where, under paragraph EU4 of this Appendix, the Secretary of State is considering whether to grant the person indefinite leave to enter or remain without a valid application under this Appendix having been made”.
That was definitely true many years ago. Nowadays Haskell has some really good tooling.
It has a feature-rich LSP, code formatter, package manager, dead-code checker, configurable linter, thread debugger, memory debugger, vulnerabilities checker, and much more.
That’s just what is provided by external tooling. Then, it also has everything the compiler has to offer, which is bit more than what most languages do. For example, you can now compile to JavaScript or WASM.
i think the tooling improves with popularity, so it's a bit of a chicken/egg problem.
But with the recent LSP decoupling of the IDE to the compiler, it is quite possible to make good tooling that is independent of any particular editor. It's just that the language's popularity is what induces contributors (as most are realistically after "fame" and "portfilio" when doing contributions).
I've worked on a variety of large UK government systems for the past ten years.
This blog encapsulates the problem of writing government services/software, which often results in strange outcomes.
Writing software for government is essentially the codification of centuries worth of Acts of Parliament.
Now imagine building the HMPO passport system, and then some underlying Law/Act is changed or repealed etc.
Now someone has to find and change everything that the Law/Act affected in all systems.
Now consider that the government frequently outsources this work to expensive consultancies who are motivated to elongate contracts and extract maximum value from the client... And ideally become entrenched.
All whilst building systems of varying quality and inflexibility so that the next time that a Law/Act is changed then this whole process repeats.
There is no central decision making authority to wrangle this problem (there used to be Spend Controls), which is why Government services delivery is so expensive.
Do you have any insight as to why, seemingly, there is no contractual obligation on contractors to make a working system. They seem to make something approximating a working system, vastly overcharge -- like x1000 -- for output that appears to be 3 months of work by one junior programmer, but then get paid as if the system actually worked.
> Do you have any insight as to why, seemingly, there is no contractual obligation on contractors to make a working system.
Often, you'll find that procurement is handled by someone working off of an incomplete set of written specifications. The procurement officer probably has no expertise with or informal knowledge of the problem to identify problems in advance, and even if they do legal requirements (ironically designed to ensure fair and transparent procurement) might force them to disregard informal knowledge over the formal specifications.
After the contract is signed, sunk cost fallacies and optimism biases take over. If the project goes over budget it might be easier to cut back on features than admit failure or demand more money, and the project will go over budget once real users start seeing the in-progress work and change requests pile up. Project managers want to be seen managing a successful project; nobody's rewarded for being the first to predict failure.
This is a kind of principal/agent problem that the private sector partially manages with equity or deferred compensation, but the profit motive has a very limited role in government and you'd probably not want to give stock options anyway. Beyond that, even the political overlords have short time horizons of 'the next election', and announcing a grand new project is almost as good as delivering one.
A high-profile example of this problem is the Canadian federal payroll system (https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/att__e_43045.html), which has led to billions of dollars in fix-ups over a decade or so.
> This is a kind of principal/agent problem that the private sector partially manages with equity or deferred compensation
The private sector also has the option (and usually the motivation) to just quietly disappear failed projects.
Wal-Mart buys an automation system for their distribution centre and it's a huge success? Tell the stock market. The system is a complete failure, we remove it and trash it? Uhhhh of course the secrets of our highly efficient warehouses are commercially confidential, couldn't possibly tell the stock market what we did or did not do.
It benefits no one to acknowledge that months were spent and the only outcome is millions of dollars wated. Sure, they could try to hold the contractor accountable, but that would put them at risk of being held accountable themselves by their own superiors for hiring that contractor in the first place. So they pretend everything works great, and pay accordingly
There's often no one to make them accountable. With a building, people know that having a supervisor that's not from the contracted company is valuable, but this hasn't caught on in software.
Three reasons, no incentives, no competition and no fraud.
Unlike in private companies, government employees are often very hard to fire, even if they tragically underperform. If your salary does not depend at all on your performance, you play by the book, follow the rules and don't particularly care about putting in good work. You have no incentives to do so. It doesn't matter how the contractor you picked performs, as long as they can't prove negligence on your part, you're not getting fired. You won't be promoted either, even if they deliver under budget and months before the deadline.
In a private company, the owner wants to make money, so there's an incentive to perform. Underperforming employees (or even entire departments) are simply cut. If a company fails at this too badly (all companies fail to some extend), the entire company underperforms and loses customers. Ultimately, the market ensures that companies grow if they're good at this and shrink if they aren't.
With governments, this is, again, not the case. You aren't going to switch to a competing passport system and drive this one out of the market, no matter how badly it sucks. Metrics won't change much, no matter how bad the UX is, as the system provides a critical service which has no alternative. This is the no competition problem.
Private companies also have more freedom to pick contractors. It's really bad PR for the government if their employees choose contractors through nepotism, so laws have been passed that standardize the contractor selection process. This means that, even if you know a contractor is not the right choice, you may be prevented from doing anything about this. Because al rules can be gamed, most government contracts are won by companies who know how to game the rules, not those who make good software and would be chosen by a knowledgeable employee. This is the no fraud problem.
Oh dear - you should European Funds for CS research programs. It’s a money making scheme for everyone involved without producing anything of substance and runs for years on end. There even companies “specialized” in every step of the process.
Because the people approving the contracts typically used to work for the consultants, and plan to work for them again in the future.
I recently renewed my passport in France. There is a new-ish platform here for every document one might want to obtain. I had one form to complete online, that was rather easy to follow. I then had to go to the office once to finish the process. That took only 10 minutes and then the passport was delivered. As painless as can be, I believe.
Whatever the situation is in the UK, it is not hopeless. The government needs to stop being afraid of hiring actual employees and bring all development in-house.
There was a group of people under the gov.uk banner who were actually really good. But a challenge is that if you employ someone, you need to fit them into your grade structure. And decent programmers earn “Senior Civil Servant” figures.
as a French citizen, I find that surprising.
While renewing a passport is one of the easiest things you can do, I distinctively remember it taking a good half-day (most of which is waiting in line jumping from one desk to another until you find someone that can check all the documents you provided are satisfactory and sign off for you).
Now however, if it's not a renewal but a new application, the difficulty sharply increases.
Even Germany has this figured out. Getting a new passport just required me to make an appointment, fill out an online form and go to the appointment with a single person. The only document I needed was my personal ID. Took like 15 minutes, not including the wait before I was called up. I feel like if Germany can get its shit together, any other country can too.
If you're applying for your very first personal ID, then you need to bring a birth certificate and another adult who already has an ID, but it's also something that's been trivial to do for years now.
Is there an opportunity for reusable OSS rule systems? It seems that every government at every level could use an expressive system for defining and versioning them.
I suspect part of the gap here is, as you note, everything technical is outsourced and so there is not enough institutional capacity to envision and execute what would be a quite revolutionary re-architecture.
I find it extremely frustrating that the government is able to spend tens of millions on contractors for an IT project, but can’t pay market rate for in-house engineers, even if those would be cheaper in the long run.
Yes, absolutely. Although that would require care and forethought regarding unintended consequences.
Most roads will lead back to consultancies stepping-in because the government org will likely lack the skills. And it's very easy for a consultancy to claim they're experts, but throw an army of graduates at it.
Interoperability between rules based systems (and legacy) software need to be considered too. It's a massive problem that will grow with time... Most government departments have some form of every generation of technology.
This problem of law being essentially an append only repository of amendments is not unique to the UK.
I'd be cool to have a system that just needs to be fed "patches" in an append only way instead of having to scatter exceptions (if branches) all around.
Some logic programming languages can do that a little bit, but I think that the real problem is that there's no tech debt budget, and lawyers working around the laws can also profit from things being complicated. It'd be cool to have people devoted to simply laws to keep things as simple as possible.
Has outsourcing ever worked for anyone? I really haven’t heard a success story involving a government outsourcing _something_ like ever.
I used to work in Spend Controls in Cabinet Office, so I got to see this across about 20 UK Government departments.
It's a bit of a race to the bottom regarding outsourcing, there are good companies and there are good technologist's but they never last more than a few years due to poor contracts, poor decision-making and poor pay.
I've actually seen some very good companies deliver on time and under budget, but then the company fails because they did the job too well and follow-up work wasn't needed.
I think that for outsourcing companies "wage theft" and doing just enough to meet the contract are core components of their business. That is, they need to optimise for high fees, low pay and the bare-minimum in quality.
Haskell has an interesting syntax: it is intuitive after someone explains it to me, but not intuitive much before the explanation.
I don't think it's because I'm used to Algol-based languages (C, Python, etc.). Every Haskell code I've seen is plagued with a plethora of operators which aim to make the code concise but it's not obvious what they do just by looking at them: https://academy.fpblock.com/haskell/tutorial/operators/
At some point, I did a rough count, and the number of operators you encounter in "normal" Haskell code—avoiding lens or domain-specific libraries—was pretty close to the number of operators you'd encounter in, say, JavaScript. This was a while ago and I don't want to redo the exercise now, but, even if we're being generous to JavaScript, practical Haskell needs on the order of 2x as many operators as practical JavaScript, not 10x.
Haskell has some up-front incidental complexity, but it's a difference of degree not kind from popular starting languages. It's easy to underestimate how much you had to learn about Algol-style languages that you've just internalized so well that you don't even realize. I've taught some complete programming beginners (high or middle schoolers) Java and Python and, especially one-on-one, I've seen how they get confused by things I did not even remember required explanation!
For example, in Python, people put : in the wrong place and don't understand how = works. "Basic" syntax like : and = are far more complex than we realize, we've just learned the basics so well that it's second nature. It's similar to how native English speakers don't even realize we have rules for adjective order ("big red ball" vs "red big ball"), while language learners run into it like a brick wall.
I don't know if you just counted the JavaScript operators but if you count all the instances where some random symbol is used then it's really a ton. There is
TypeScript adds even more: and there are countless ECMA proposals and TypeScript feature request that want to pile on even more. People seem to have zero qualms about cryptic syntax. I think the difference is that this syntax is mostly very ad-hoc. If you know the language already, this just adds a liiiittle bit extra to solve some very specific problem. On the other hand, Haskell operators like <$>, <*>, >>= are extremely general. After years I still learn about new and unexpected ways that you can use them (e.g. what the hell is `fix <$> id`). But paradoxically, because they can be used in so many seemingly unrelated contexts, you have no idea what to use them for at all initially.I think that’s true as far as it goes, but there are further reasons why Haskell is more difficult. Here is one:
In Haskell, the lack of parentheses for function calls plus currying means that to read a function call, you need to already know how many arguments the function takes, which I feel adds a new level of difficulty over languages where you can often guess what a function does based on its name, without looking it up.
As a result, often Haskell reads more like math, where without knowing each symbol’s definition, you’re lost.
I’ve seen cryptic JavaScript too, but less often.
> the lack of parentheses for function calls plus currying means that to read a function call, you need to already know how many arguments the function takes
While I agree with the general sentiment of what you are saying, note that the syntax has nothing to do with it, it is purely about Haskell using currying excessively. The syntactic translation between Haskell and JS is straight-forward and 1-1:
I agree that excessive currying is not great, and generally push for non-curried arguments unless a curried form realy is used in practice. But for this to really be comfortable, and to still enjoy all the hgiher-order programming that's nice with Haskell, we would need good records (strucural, anonymous, extensible), which it doesn't really have right now, so we are stuck with currying.Yes, you could write the same thing, but defaults and language conventions matter. Writing curried functions in JavaScript is awkward enough that nobody does it by default. If you did, people would ask why in a review.
> practical Haskell needs on the order of 2x as many operators as practical JavaScript, not 10x.
Yeah but the JavaScript operators are almost all universally understood. There are some exceptions and mistakes, like `===` which shouldn't exist, and `.?` which is new but fairly standard. But most of the operators are just standard maths stuff, normal array/field accesses, etc.
Haskell has normal operators plus a bunch of weird operators that you need to learn. Even if the raw number of operators is only 2x, the number of operators that you have to learn is probably 10x.
Especially when you consider that Javascript operators are fixed so you have to learn them once, whereas Haskell operators are user-defined and Haskell programmers love defining them.
Haskell operators are generally well-chosen to have a consistent visual language:
* $ is "function application" - f $ x = f x, but lets you elide nested parens: f $ g $ h x = f (g (h x))
* & is "reverse function application" x & f = f x. This reads nicely in pipelines as "and"
* <$> is "fmap" what is like a lifted application over a structure: f <$> [1, 2, 3] = [f 1, f 2, f 3]
* <&> is "reverse fmap", which is nice when you have a big lambda
* Anything in <_> brackets is generally a "lifted" version of some operator
* And so on
I still don't understand equality in JavaScript. ;-)
The only thing to understand is that you need a blanket ban on `==` and `!=` using ESLint.
Combinator style, while good and well designed and all they only ended up inventing the next perl.
#haskell on freenode in the 2000s was a really fun place. I could not for the life of me convince anyone else to use the language.
Oh, I owe a lot to freenode and #haskell and #math in particular. I remember one of them ran a lecture on category theory, live. It was also there I first heard about Martin-Löf type theory.
It was such a great time and place for a young person interested in learning about Haskell.
Do you remember who ran it? I used to go to hack phi at UPenn, which attracted a significant chunk of the community.
The lecture? No, unfortunately.
err, no
the perl6 guys ended up inventing the new perl (now renamed raku)
https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/raku-burritos/
the first perl6 parser (pugs) was written in Haskell btw
I'm aware. I was using the world pejoratively. Combinator style degrades into line noise.
no doubt its fashionable to think "perl == line noise == bad"
however, there are certain sub languages (slangs) where the use of punctuation chars as operators is very helpful, of course regex is the most compelling where the code is parsing one char at a time
imo raku has improved the situation a lot by introducing "regex 2.0" with deep support for unicode and with built in grammars that can work smoothly with regexAhh not sure I agree. The reputation for being unreadable is pretty well deserved. It didn't happen for no reason.
ok - I agree that there was a culture of golfing and obscurity in some sections of the perl coder base
it was inevitable that a simpler language - Python - would take the big slice of scripters who wanted something easier to learn and to read
I'm sad that perl no longer has a credible niche for script level coders who want to learn a more powerful and more expressive language than Python ...
Combinators (in the Haskell sense) have nothing to do with whether you write your functions with letters or with comic book swearing.
The IRC channel still exists! It's on libera.chat now, though.
Most of the operators in that link are bog standard, and among the least interesting things to say about Haskell.
If I didn't know programming and picked at random some Java program, I wouldn't understand much either. If I didn't take a single math course and I tried to read a math formula, I wouldn't understand the operators or anything either.
The standard should be: how much can you understand once you learn the basics and do a couple of tutorials?
> it is intuitive after someone explains it to me, but not intuitive much before the explanation
Isn't that pretty close to what something being intuitive means? Ie. something being intuitive means that it's easily understood or learned without requiring prior knowledge or instruction.
With Haskell code it is often so that the code which actually does something is expressed in terms of combinators. These combinators are often very general, so one must do a bit of mental work to understand what they do in this particular context.
Once you understand what the combinators do in a particular context the code often reads very easily, and what it does is very intuitive and natural.
Best example I can think of is applicative parsers, where there are scattered <*> and <$> operators around, but if you just ignore them the parser just looks like a very intuitive description of what the expressions you want to parse look like.
I think Larry Wall mentioned something like this regarding perl. Things can only be intuitive after learning them. I do not think it is syntax you are complaining about either. Some constructs in Haskell reference a certain model (monads, lenses) and no syntax is going to infuse any reader with that knowledge if they do not possess it already.
I love this. It starts as a parody, then slowly morphs into a serious and elegant solution to the "game". By the end, I almost wish I could play it myself. Bravo.
I think you can play, just much harder to get through the end game stage.
Anyone can play but only ~70 million people can win :)
I had to do a MN1 application for my US-born daughter as both me and my partner were born abroad. As OP alludes to this is a sort of side quest called "registration" which if you don't do it before the child is 18 lapses (although I think there are still routes to obtain citizenship in these circs).
The most difficult part of the process (not dealt with in this version of Passport Application but maybe a future DLC pack?) was actually finding someone who could certify my evidence (you are meant to submit originals but they keep the docs including passports for 3-6 months which is a bit unrealistic if you are living abroad). I can't remember the exact rules but it wasn't possible to use a US notary or a normal solicitor certification process and instead I needed to go to a council office.
After calling about 5 councils all of whom disavowed any knowledge of the process or its requirements I ended up finding someone at Islington Council who was delightfully helpful. But it was one of the more frustrating UK government interactions I've had.
For the benefit of anyone else doing this in Japan, these are the documents I had to submit. It will be different depending on circumstance, in particular I think the author may also be born outside the UK which may require other/more documents.
Anyway I had to submit:
Certified copy of my birth certificate, order from the UK general register office.
Original (not photocopy) of Japanese family register and translation.
Certificate of acceptance of notification of birth, original and translation.
Original Marriage certificate and translation.
Colour photocopy of every page of my childs Japanese passport.
Copy photocopy of the passport of an American or British citizen who confirms that child is mine.
The process is pretty unclear, and in general you seem to have to just keep submitting documents until they are satisfied.
> I think the author may also be born outside the UK which may require other/more documents
In fact `applicant's father` (me) was born in the UK in this case, but `applicant's father's father` was not, the cause of the extra complications.
I have to wonder how they would handle cases where a person doesn't have a legal father at all.
If you don't have a legal father then you can't claim British citizenship through your father. That's all pretty straightforward. (Although there's a fun case where you can claim citizenship by double descent because your ancestor wasn't able to claim citizenship because of sexist historical laws).
:(
Weirdly this never came up for me (and I'm in a similar situation). I suspect what documents are ask for varies a lot by who is assessing the application.
Hope it all works out!
That’s interesting, no requirement for parental birth certificates?
I was asked to provide (I am British, wife is Hungarian, living in Hungary) both parents’ birth certificates and all four grandparents’ birth certificates.
My wife is not in touch with her father, so we had to submit a cover letter explaining the situation, which was accepted (although I don’t really see why it was relevant anyway, my son’s Britishness is derived from my Britishness, her nationality and the nationality of her parents is essentially irrelevant).
We also didn’t have to copy the passport of anyone else, but we did have to have a family friend do the confirmation online (family friend is a lawyer in the UK, so was on the list of approved jobs for this).
In my case, as a British citizen married to a European living outside the UK, I had way fewer requests/demands for documentation.
All I needed to do was submit my own details, and a copy of both the marriage certificate and birth certificate for the child.
The assumption was made that as a married couple the child had me as the father, and as I'm British then so were they.
No references at all to grandparents, or even the mother's details, in the online wizard I filled out. Quite a quick process, which reminds me I probably need to renew their UK passport since it has expired a couple of years back.
Were you born before 1983? It seems that makes it easier
Maybe that's the difference, but yes I was.
> although I don’t really see why it was relevant anyway, my son’s Britishness is derived from my Britishness, her nationality and the nationality of her parents is essentially irrelevant
This is essentially happened to me, the "75% of the initial doc requests turned out to be irrelevant" was referring to this sort of thing.
Parent of applicant but not grandparents, at least in my case.
> Colour photocopy of every page of my childs Japanese passport.
But why?
Don't know in this case, but some other countries ask for it to deduce your travel history (any current passport itself goes to them, with color copies of every page of old passports). Qatar wanted it because I shared name with somebody born 40 years before me.
Interesting. Just out of curiosity: did you naturalize as a Qatari (didn’t even know it was possible!), or was it a visa-related thing?
I just looked it up. I was dating a Qatari and didn't even dare to explore naturalization. The process is insane. As a man, you can't get citizenship through marriage (only women get that). So, as a guy I would have to live there for 25 continuous years with little time outside the country. Add on that they require you to be rich, Muslim and speak Gulf Arabic at native level. Also, you have to give up your birth citizenship (not always possible) and they can revoke your citizenship on a whim.
Qatar is a fascinating country, though.
No, I can't ever. I was an immigrant worker there, and Qatar Immigration wanted all this before they give me work visa aka residence permit.
Another reason is that the UK forbids the child to have different names on their japanese passport and their UK passport, which is often (almost always?) the case
Not only can you complete a UK Passport Application completely online (save for mailing any required documentations to HMPO), you can apply for a brand new passport as a "new" citizen (by adoption, naturalisation, or descent), online, from outside the UK, with just a mobile device without downloading some special app, including taking the photos.
Sure, you can play it on "hard mode " and do it with paper and pen for the lulz, but my experience was extremely efficient, fast, and straight-forward.
I went through the UK online passport renewal system last year, and it is the best website I have used in a very very long time. A real breath of fresh air. It worked perfectly on my old computer and 'ancient' browser. Everything very simple / accessible / clear, colours, text, buttons, fields, requirements. A simple step-by-step navigation and actually friendly.
It is a shame that more businesses dont care about their customers enough to invest in such a well designed website. Well done HMPO.
I work with Equal Experts, who built this system for HMPO. Feels good to get this feedback.
You can easily tell the difference between services built under GDS, where the work favoured local contractors and agencies and otherwise smaller outfits, and those farmed out to the usual huge consultancy firms that are typically mired in controversy.
I would have much, much lower expectations for a body shop like Infosys or Accenture or Thoughtworks. They probably wouldn’t implement the design system right without billing extra for attention to detail.
I agree, I also renewed my passport recently and the website and process is quite smooth. It's the more complex cases, first requests from abroad, etc., that lack automation.
Seconded! In my experience, Gov.UK does pretty well in general and am happy to say that as one who privately fumes about various aspects of Britain in recent years.
Renewed recently which was my first time using the online system. The entire process was exceptionally fast. I got the passport back in less than 2 weeks from California.
In comparison my Canadian passport renewal (damaged after 3 years) from California took 4 months. Was entirely paper based and had ridiculous requirements such as requiring a reference and a photograph stamped by photographer.
I know there's a digital pilot that's ongoing. That should be rolled out ASAP.
Just being able to do it via mail sounds like luxury, to renew a Swedish passport you need to visit an embassy in person. And then in 2 weeks go back in person to pick it up. Really fun when the embassy is on the other side of the country and it means expensive plane trips. This was even more of a problem during COVID when borders were closed, since Sweden doesn't have embassies in every single country.
And they expire in 5 years, not 10 like many other countries.
I need to renew my Belgian passport soon, and I live in the United States.
Even though the consulate has my biometric data, I need to visit them in person.
My only saving grace is that they sometimes visit my city., and I can register there. But that registration is only valid for 1 year, and they don't visit every year...
And that is still 2h+ one way of travel for me, for something they already have.
> Even though the consulate has my biometric data, I need to visit them in person.
don't they need to re-record them after X years? I thought that was the whole point of renewing an identity document/passport.
The Belgian passport comes in exceptionally fast though. For me it was ready for pick up in the Belgian embassy in less than a week from application.
You make it seem much simpler than it is in reality. I accept the process for renewals has been streamlined with considerable success but, as someone who recently helped a friend apply for his first passport a couple of years ago, I can attest the process is drawn out and tedious. An in-person interview is required, as is a signature from a 'responsible person' that many people do not have access to (Doctors are not accepted, for instance).
I too have enjoyed a game of *Passport Application* by proxy.
One of the interesting rules the OP doesn't appear to mention is the 'mutable history' rule. Herein, the facts contained in a single document can alter over even short periods of time requiring that a document, already scanned into the Examiners system of fact recording, can be required to be returned for subsequent scans. Verifying documents have not altered in their facts is, some say, tacit acknowledgement by the Examiner breed that a multiverse exists.
The communication channel between the "NPC" telephone agents and the Examiners appears to be somewhat akin to prayer, only vague inferences can truly be received.
Aside, I suspect the OP maybe be a Mornington Crescent aficianado; a game seemingly similar in rule-topology to the aforementioned Passport Application.
Yes and in the British system names can be fluid, changed at will with no declarations being made. That’s how my mother was able to register my birth with the surname of her mother’s third (!) marriage. Birth certificates are also immutable in certain ways but not entirely everything on it is immutable.
Not to mention the passport office has forgotten previous decisions for my own passport where this sort of surname discrepancy has been explained away. (Including one passport where I am listed on a page of her passport!)
The NPCs are infuriating. I called, emailed and received a different answer every time. It was like a poor LLM.
After applying I had to explain to my mother that within the same batch of applications, one daughter required additional UK documents but the other one didn’t (the passport came), purely because one was born in the UK and the other one wasn’t. She rightly flipped out, raised it with an MP and it was resolved within a day.
Similarly for us, siblings each required different treatment. Even when part of the same application. All born in the same UK hospital to the same parents and having the same home address. Fun.
It was interesting to speculate what exactly the one child whose passport came months later had done that warranted the Examiner's extra scrutiny. Something to do with reincarnation I expect.
That's absurd! I hope it's all sorted out now. Personally hoping my kids won't have trouble when they turn 18 and have to interview.
I just went through hell this with one of my daughters. She was born in Japan and I had a hard time getting my mother’s surname matching what was on my birth certificate.
Long story short, I demonstrated I was born in England and that I have citizenship (a passport) so no matter the possibility, it must be something that can be passed on. That doesn’t match the guidelines of documents required but it’s much less of a pain I reckon.
> What are the base cases? A base case is an ancestor whose Britishness does not depend on a parent, e.g. someone who was naturalised, or born in the UK before 1983 (which makes one unconditionally british regardless of parents). That's right, further into the future we get from 1983, the taller these call-stacks can get.
This is insane to me, coming from a country that simply has a central database of all citizens and foreign residents, and a citizenship check is probably something like a single SELECT on an SQL table.
Many countries simply have no way of knowing who their citizens are.
People born abroad are often citizens.
The British have had an insane number of changes in territory that affect citizenship.
Some of their current citizens have citizenship because they were born in Bombay (Mumbai). Others because they were born in Hong Kong.
Maintaining a reliable list of citizens requires regular registration, and loosing citizenship if you don’t register.
Even in that case it would probably enough to prove your citizenship once to get into the database.
It would have to be combine with other databases. A death index, at the least.
> citizenship check is probably something like a single SELECT on an SQL table
I am willing to bet, with extremely unfavorable odds to me, that is not true
SingPass[0] says hi.
[0] https://www.singpass.gov.sg/main/
Trying to track down some other reference, I see that there was work on formalising British nationality -- in Prolog! -- in 1986: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/British%20Nationality%2...
I played this a few years ago.
Despite being born in the UK to a British father my character wasn't previously British due to parents being unmarried and being born after 1983 but before the 2006 rules update.
I'm not totally sure when but I think some time in the 2010s the 2006 update became retroactive so my character was allowed to play. Didn't have to do too many side quests - the main one was retrieving father's birth certificate.
My character also had to attend the endgame ceremony and swear allegiance to the queen, which seemed odd for someone born in the country and lived here all his life
At least you got the bonus endscreen credits!
This reminds me of an article read about how DSL was used to automate/encode Dutch tax code.
I can’t recall the article I read but this is a good presentation.
https://tomassetti.me/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2018-04-10-...
I think an Italian version of this game could be very interesting.
It's not "quite expensive" if you compare it to the Australian passport which is 2x as expensive and so notoriously badly bound, holders joke Australian Border Protection forces test for forgeries by checking if the blue cover curls: if not, it's a fake.
The Australian passport curl was so disappointing. I have a decade-old passport from my third-world country of origin, and that was in far better shape than my new Australian passport that was freshly delivered.
I seem to recall playing a version of this game as a text adventure. Douglas Adams was involved? But not Hitchhiker’s Guide.
I have noticed in Japan the crazy bureaucratization of document applications in the 7-8 years I've been living here. I've had 2 Japanese documents expire, "MyNumber" and "Driving License" in these years, and when trying to re-obtain them the process has become MUCH more complex. I'm bad at remembering all these processes in detail, but these are from memory:
- For the mynumber, first time, it was a simple application, and maybe a trip or two to the City Hall. This was at a moment where Japan was trying everyone to have/use the mynumber system so that might've made it easier on purpose.
- The second time I needed to book an appointment to request the application forms, which were (snail)mailed to me so then I could apply for the card. Yes, that sentence is as bad as it reads.
Now the crazier one is the driving license (conversion process):
- The first time I needed to get a translation, I went to JAL, showed my documents and paid, then received the translation. Took that and 2-3 documents, went to the driving license center, and gave the documents and passports and IDs. Waited few hours and had it done. Oh, I also got the Motorbike license for free.
- The second time I am applying now: need to get the translation, first register online for the translation, for which you need to create an account and a 8-step process. Hard, but still doable [1]. Then you need to book a meeting for the driving license center. But it's very hard to do so, in fact I couldn't find the link at all. I went in person and they showed me a QR code for the booking, I suspect this is hard to find on purpose. Every place is full and cannot be booked, except for 1 of them, 2 months later. Okay, I try to apply. First basic questions, sure, then asks for travel history on my passport that I need to input manually. Note that dates in one part of the form are on the shape of `YYYYMMDD` and in other they are 3 fields of "YYYY", "MM", "DD" (3 different inputs), having to write a dozen of them is maddening. Oh wait, but if I want the motorbike one, which was automatic before, I now need a document from the Spanish embassy as well, another side quest. I'm hoping they can at least provide it in Japanese. I guess I'm halfway that process now, got a meeting booked 2 months later.
[1] https://english.jaf.or.jp/driving-in-japan/drive-in-japan/ab...
Ha! I go to Japan every now and then, as I have friends there, and I've though a couple times about doing the Japanese driving license thing, that looked super easy back at the time (translate your current driving license, book a meeting in the exam center, do a short exam, and you're almost good to go). I was thinking about doing it in my next trip in two weeks, but seems like they've raised the difficulty several levels :)
(Spaniard here too...)
A friend lives there, he said basically:
if you drive on the right at home, they will fail you the first time on principle. If you drive on the left (aus, brit) you have a chance to pass the first time.
> I go to Japan every now and then
AFAIK this is only available for residents? People traveling can/should use the international driving permit. Both JAL (translation) and the center itself asked me for my resident card.
> do a short exam
Oh there's no exam needed at least! Unless you mean the eye test?
It’s not, you can get a Japanese driving license without living here ; but the government is making some noises to cut back on that (some recent semi-notable accidents caused by foreigners).
It’s apparently been a loophole for Chinese and Vietnamese tourists to get a license that is more recognized abroad then their own.
I think restricting this to residents makes sense; I’m more wary of making it more complex or difficult in other ways, but I also have that quest behind me so I don’t really care to be fair.
As to exam - that depends entirely as to where your “original” driving license is from.
Some countries just need a sufficient amount of paperwork (which sometimes is more difficult than the exam), some require just a theory exam, some require both theory and practical exam. In case of the US, it also differs state by state, because of course it does; why would anything ever make sense.
> As to exam - that depends entirely as to where your “original” driving license is from.
Yes, that's why I was replying that since we both are Spaniards "(Spaniard here too...)"
The "Spaniard" was mostly for reference, as right now I can't remember who sent me the information about the exams, so it might not apply to Europe or Spain.
But the documents required (at least previously to recent changes) for the license transfer were [0]:
And it didn't mention any residence documents. I don't know how that works today...--
Great read, best laugh of the day!
This is one of many reasons why America's birthright citizenship is an incredible optimization: most people can prove they are American with a single document, a birth certificate.
Back in the 2000s, the Justice Department prosecuted someone for a terrorist offense. They researched their birth and found out their parents were technically diplomats of a foreign country.
It was a weird case, because the parents hadn’t actually been working for the foreign embassy for a while, and didn’t know they still held diplomatic status when their daughter was born.
They had entered the US as diplomats and shortly after decided to go local. That was probably their plan all along - lots of diplomats from third world countries do that.
It was a huge shock.
Kind of a “surprise, you’re not actually a citizen, even though both your parents and all your siblings are!”
She was deported.
Probably you’re referring to those woman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoda_Muthana
Maybe? I remember both parents being diplomats.
The sarcasm here is off the charts.
My First Reaction: Given that the game can be read as a deconstruction of the concept of Nation States and Citizenship, why would the UK government run such a thing?
After a few minutes: Oh wait a minute...
Classic!
>written in arcane language, in various texts called "acts of parliament".
>British passports are issued to those who have a claim to British nationality under the British Nationality Act 1981.
Has the British language really evolved that much in the last 50 years?
There was a law change about European Union citizens settlement scheme last week. It's a UK law which is like a tutorial for getting to play the passport game. Anyway, the following was written this year. It starts off by checking if you are a Lisp interpreter:
Changes to Appendix EU
APP EU1. In Annex 1, in sub-paragraph (a) of the definition of ‘continuous qualifying period’, after “(b)(i)(ee) below”, insert “(or unless sub- paragraph (b)(i)(ii) below applies)”.
APP EU2. In Annex 1, for sub-paragraph (b)(i)(ii) of the definition of ‘continuous qualifying period’, substitute:
“(ii) (where the person has limited leave to enter or remain granted under paragraph EU3 or EU3A of this Appendix) any period(s) of absence which did not exceed a total of 30 months in the most recent 60-month period, as at the date of application or (as the case may be) at the date on which, under paragraph EU4, the Secretary of State is considering whether to grant them indefinite leave to enter or remain under paragraph EU2 or (as the case may be) EU2A, without a valid application under this Appendix having been made; or
(jj) any period of absence due directly to an order or decision to which sub-paragraph (b)(iii) below refers, where that order or decision has been set aside or revoked; or”.
APP EU3. In Annex 1, for sub-paragraph (c)(v) of the definition of ‘continuous qualifying period’, substitute:
“(v) a relevant reference is concerned; or
(vi) sub-paragraph (b)(i)(ii) above applies, where, under paragraph EU4 of this Appendix, the Secretary of State is considering whether to grant the person indefinite leave to enter or remain without a valid application under this Appendix having been made”.
The more obvious interpretation is that it’s written in a bureaucratic way that not everyone would understand.
Legal copy written in 2025 could be considered arcane.
It doesn’t mean the language of the time is hard to understand.
It’s arcane because it’s technical, legal language. British English as a whole has not meaningfully changed that much in just 50 years.
Arcane does not mean the same as archaic.
In addition to the sibling comments, this is a style of humourous writing. They're just saying that legislation is not straight forward to understand.
Just fantastic. Bravo.
This is so infuriating. Props to the author for sublimating it into a coding challenge.
Haskell itself is an amazing language once it "clicks". But all the tooling around Haskell is just really bad.
That was definitely true many years ago. Nowadays Haskell has some really good tooling.
It has a feature-rich LSP, code formatter, package manager, dead-code checker, configurable linter, thread debugger, memory debugger, vulnerabilities checker, and much more.
That’s just what is provided by external tooling. Then, it also has everything the compiler has to offer, which is bit more than what most languages do. For example, you can now compile to JavaScript or WASM.
This isn't really true nowadays.
Also, you can build pretty much everything in Haskell with a plain text editor and ghci. You get better code that way too!
i think the tooling improves with popularity, so it's a bit of a chicken/egg problem.
But with the recent LSP decoupling of the IDE to the compiler, it is quite possible to make good tooling that is independent of any particular editor. It's just that the language's popularity is what induces contributors (as most are realistically after "fame" and "portfilio" when doing contributions).
> all the tooling around Haskell is just really bad.
No it isn’t. This is a stupid meme that people just dogmatically perpetuate.
No, this was from first hand experience. I guess Visual Studio and PyCharm have spoiled me.
I wasn’t expecting your gripe to be about text editors. What exactly do you think is missing in Haskell? You can write Haskell in VSCode.
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UK is easy mode.
Try France, or maybe Germany.
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