Small > Big

Imagine software that could be useful for a long time

so, what...5 years? 10? 50?

how about 1000 years?

what would THAT software look like?

what other systems have endured for that long?

why?

law!

our legal system comes from England, and evolved in the Middle Ages

they had some interesting problems

MURDER

Wergild

or "man price"

blood feud is not very conducive to healthy society

Less sexy problem: people stealing each others' land

solution: writ of novel disseisin

• established by Assize of Clarendon by Henry II in 1166
• it was EXPEDIENT - it didn't deal with proper legal possession, which was hard to establish - it only asked if a dispossession had OCCURRED.
• this made it wildly popular

functional: solving these problems is a means to an end

really, it's two things:

kingship

power

King Arthur

not about the thing you probably think it's about

the mythos of "good kingship"

chronicler in Henry I's time claimed that he was "such a good king that one could walk the entire length of the kingdom with gold in one's arms unmolested"

WTF does this have to do with software

we can look at this as a systems modeling problem

how does the king acquire and keep power?

well, here's the basic recipe:

• publicly wrap yourself in the pervasive mythos
• actually do some of the legend, and posture around the rest
• PROFIT

but the devil's in the details

kingship mythos was very noisy

but in that, murder was the signal

MURDER: the right problem

• uh, murder sucks
• localized solutions were difficult
• it injects the king into day-to-day life
• the king is established as the deciderre: what violence is legal, or illegal

once murder (the ultimate violent act) was crown business, other violent acts were a fair game

in systems terms, it was generative. elegant, even.

LAND-THEFT: the (other) right problem

• it was an expedient solution, though hardly a good model
• but it "Just Worked," and damn, if that didn't 'drive adoption'
• abolished after more than 650 years, in 1833

Small > Big

law isn't code (yet), but systems are systems