Next time I hear an mainframe-era computer scientist complaining about the punch card machines of IT-folklore, I will have a new sense of sympathy. Writing a patent is like trying to write a computer program which takes up to several years to compile – or fail and come back with errors. Naturally, like the punch card programmers of legend, one must painstakingly go over every last inch of verbiage, lest the application come back a year later with “compilation errors”. Without the help of legal professionals, (and possibly even with their help) it could take months of back and forth to get the syntax of the patent right.

So in this sense, the towering fees of the patent attorney, which are enough to make anyone cringe, are actually justified. The patent attorney is like a very specialized computer programmer working on very old machines – but it’s worse than that: their code must be compiled by a human – the most capricious computer of all.

[Dave's note: To be fair, my first draft had some pretty bad syntax errors; I'm impressed you compiled it at all.]