As chair of the Masonry Standards Joint Committee and a long-time ENR subscriber, I read with interest your article on building codes, "Structural Engineers Labor to Unravel Mysteries of Building Codes" (ENR 7/18 p. 26). On behalf of MSJC, which updates its Code and Specification at 3-year intervals and whose latest edition was published in 2005, I appreciate your assessment that we present relatively few difficulties for practicing designers.
We continue to work hard on user-friendliness in a context of technical excellence, on the simplified design procedures that you advocate and on dialog to establish a code-development cycle whose length addresses development as well as assimilation of new knowledge.