Lawyers As Homo-Programmers
Human languages as code.
... A hypothesis, first advanced by Edward Sapir in 1929 and subsequently developed by Benjamin Whorf, that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience.
Consider the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis above.
If you accept it, then you must accept that:
Human languages (or your own language) affect how you perceive the world.
Languages allow you to affect others and how they perceive you too.
When you use language skillfully (say by rhetoric, poetry, or narrative), you inflict an effect unto the emotional and cognitive systems of other humans, which may trigger or change their behaviour.
If so, human languages are without a doubt a form of programming.
Sure, it's not syntactic code per se, like the one we rigidly instruct computers with. Human languages are fuzzy, chock full of both good and terrible indeterminate non-best practices (e.g. cultural coding, linguistic cliches, etc), and inherently ambiguous.
But as meaningful code? Yes, human languages qualify:
If you can 'reprogram' the way you or others see and think, then human languages are semantic, and instructive.
In fact - lawyers who persuade, bind or compel behavior must fundamentally be 'programmers' (just that they professionally work on other human beings as their 'source material').
Such then leads us to question: how does one resist external programming?
...Or use languages to reprogram the internal self?