A Roman Name for Software

Studying Latin and the Catiline affair prompts a comparison: Cato’s insistence that things be called by their true names is used to diagnose a rot in software. The piece argues that business software and systems engineering are meant to create disciplined vocabularies - taxonomies that map words to real things - but successive fashions have hollowed that project. Rather than careful naming that ties concepts to referents, the field frequently substitutes plausible-sounding labels and quick schemata, abandoning the craft of precise denotation for short-term gains and rhetorical ease.

Concrete examples trace earlier “fevers” - expert systems, object orientation - that began with the goal of faithful knowledge representation and ended up bending domains to faddish abstractions. The current problem is deeper: tooling makes it trivial to generate names that denote nothing, while management retreats to counting (tickets, velocity, adoption) as a surrogate for understanding. That loss of guardianship over meaning mirrors Rome’s erosion of civic virtues and the fading memory of why names mattered; the ledger and double-entry survive only as inherited labels. The warning is clear: if the discipline keeps consuming its own memories, future makers will stand amid ruins with words that no longer point to anything.