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Now imagine building the HMPO passport system, and then some underlying Law/Act is changed or repealed etc.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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
yield*
function*
a?.b?.c
function f(x = 3) {
x ??= 3
...
a!.b
Type<T>
type A = B extends C ? D : E
...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It is a shame that more businesses dont care about their customers enough to invest in such a well designed website. Well done HMPO.
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.
And they expire in 5 years, not 10 like many other countries.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
But why?
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.
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.
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 can’t recall the article I read but this is a good presentation.
https://tomassetti.me/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2018-04-10-...
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.
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