A Roman Name for Software

It has not been long since I began studying Latin rigorously, and anyone who does will invariably find themselves immersed in the Roman world. It is remarkable to me how many events of Rome's past still wander among us like restless ghosts. One in particular, which I came across recently, made me think a great deal about our field. In 63 BC, the Roman Senate gathered to decide the fate of the men who had conspired with Catiline to set arson to the Eternal City and murder its magistrates. The conspirators were already in custody; the question was merely what to do with them. Julius Caesar, then praetor-elect, rose and delivered a speech that would make fools of our leaders today. He warned the senators against passion, invoked precedent, spoke reverently of the law, and proposed that the men to be dispersed among the towns of Italy and held there for life. It was a speech the most prudent of men would have envied. Then Cato the Younger, considerably less pleasant company, stood up. Sallust preserves his reply in the Bellum Catilinae, and there is one passage in it that I have not been able to get out of my head for weeks: Iam pridem equidem nos vera vocabula rerum amisimus. Quia bona aliena largiri liberalitas, malarum rerum audacia fortitudo vocatur, eo res publica in extremo sita est. Long ago, in truth, we lost the true names of things. Because giving away what belongs to others is called generosity, and daring in wicked deeds is called courage, the republic now stands at the very edge. The Senate followed Cato, and whatever one thinks of the verdict -- there is much to think about, I assure you -- it is worth observing that what moved them was simply a man insisting that things are to be called by what they are. Figure 1: The Senate during the Catilinarian affair, as imagined by Cesare Maccari. I have been thinking about this because our field is, as it usually goes, abandoning precision in exchange for cheap gains that will be pulverized sooner or later, and in doing so, we pitch ourselves a world with a vocabulary that was not inherited, isntead of one that enriches our intellect. This happens in business software and in systems engineering alike, though, as I have come to observe, not in the same way. One is burned from the outside, by cycles of fashion it does not control, while the other burns itself from the inside, and with considerable pride. Both, however, suffer from the same disease: names that no longer mean what they say, and the social lunacy that follows. Business software is, at its core, a world of discourse. Each of its concepts is an attempt to give a faithful denotation to something that exists, to borrow Aristotle's terms, in potency or in act, and to build a logical system that relates those names to one another. I wrote some time ago that the honest aim of most such systems, whether their authors realize it or not, is an isomorphism between the world of discourse and a formal system. This is why I have taken the liberty of appropriating the title a friend of mine coined for his own role at work: taxonomist. It sounds grandiose on a business card, but I know of no more accurate description for the petite bourgeoisie. The taxonomist names and classifies, with hopes of making it possible to speak about that of which can be perceived: he's just a more literal poet! And as I grow old, I notice the arsenic slowly growing stronger. When the "expert systems" fever of the eighties broke, the serious ambition behind it, which I suppose was representing the knowledge of a domain formally, was thrown out alongside the fever, and "knowledge representation" became something of an embarrassment for a whole decade. When Java arrived in the middle of the dotcom mania, object orientation promised to capture the hierarchies and relationships of entities directly in code, and we started to bend domains into whatever silly signs of the times and the reign of quantity demanded, with the goal of, I assume once again, "better knowledge representation". Each of these fevers begins by promising to restore a conceptual model, always in pursuit of the same desire, and each arrives there through an ever more distorted view of reality. Why? The present fever is the most pernicious yet, as it attacks the very material software is made of. Simply producing words, and in particular words that look like names, are plausible names, but almost never truly names, for it answers to no referent, only to Occam's dream. Those words are not even one's own: they are the residue of everything our forefathers wrote, recombined without the labor that once tied each of them to a thing. A schema generated in seconds may be full of entities that denote nothing in particular, and yet nobody considers the sign. And when understanding blurs, the hand closes: middle management -- and I do not mean any particular person here, most of them are decent people placed in an impossible position -- tightens its fist around the only things it can still count, such as tickets, merge requests, velocity, adoption and other silly metrics, until counting quietly takes the place of knowing. Observe the vocabulary around you, and tell me whether it does not all come down to counting. Cato would recognize the grammar: bona aliena largiri, giving away what is not yours -- be it the future maintainer's time, the customer's trust, or the names our predecessors took the trouble to find -- and calling it liberalitas. The machine did not invent the distortion; it merely made it effortless to produce names that denote nothing. Clearly the arsenic is in the water, and it tastes like fine wine. Software today, I am sorry to announce, has no guardians, only a phased out memory of why they were given, and that memory is exactly what each fever consumes. Cato knew this kind of forgetting well, and in the same speech he reminds the senators that their forefathers did not make the republic great by force of arms, but by being industrious at home, just rule abroad and a mind free in deliberation, before turning to his own generation: Pro his nos habemus luxuriam atque avaritiam, publice egestatem, privatim opulentiam. Laudamus divitias, sequimur inertiam. In place of these, we have luxury and avarice, poverty in public, opulence in private. We praise wealth, and we pursue idleness. Figure 2: Mosaic at the ancient Roman city of Lixus. Such are the ruins of Rome, and of our post-liberal world: the taxonomy of the present is still that of our forefathers and not that of our dreams. The ledger and the double entry Pacioli set down in 1494 is still named by people who had to answer for those names, and we have been praising that wealth while pursuing idleness, spending an inheritance whose labor we no longer remember. We become the society we dream of, and in the present nightmare each new dream seems only to make us pray to forget a little more of the names, as though they were a burden rather than the very beams holding the house up. When all of this dies, as every fever eventually does, will anyone still remember the true names around the ruins?