Published on September 25, 2026, the essay by mmagueta uses a Roman political crisis to examine software vocabulary. In 63 BC, the Senate considered the fate of Catiline’s conspirators, who were held for plotting arson in Rome and the murder of magistrates. Julius Caesar, then praetor-elect, urged caution, respect for precedent and lifelong confinement for the prisoners in Italian towns. Cato the Younger argued that the republic had lost its proper names when harmful acts received honorable labels. Sallust preserves the speech in Bellum Catilinae, and the Senate adopted Cato’s position. The essay also cites Cato’s description of public poverty, private wealth, luxury, avarice and idleness.

The author applies that lesson to business software and systems engineering. Business software is presented as a system of concepts that should correspond to things in the domain and form a coherent formal model. Referring to an earlier essay, “Method Worship,” mmagueta describes this goal as an isomorphism between a domain’s vocabulary and its formal representation. The author adopts the role name “taxonomist” for the people who name and classify what a system can describe.

The essay traces the same problem through several software fashions. The collapse of the expert-systems movement in the 1980s pushed knowledge representation out of favor. During the Java and dotcom period, object orientation promised direct models of entities and relationships, while commercial pressures bent domains toward fashionable abstractions. The current wave produces plausible words and schemas within seconds, even when those names have no clear referent. The machine made that distortion easy to produce. Management then relies on tickets, merge requests, velocity and adoption because those quantities remain easy to count.

The closing argument links this loss of meaning to older accounting practice. Luca Pacioli’s ledger and double-entry system, recorded in 1494, still carry names shaped by people who had to answer for them. The essay asks whether software will retain such careful vocabulary after the current fever passes. Its illustrations include Cesare Maccari’s imagined Senate during the Catilinarian affair and a mosaic from the ancient Roman city of Lixus.