Doghouses and cathedrals

Alan Kay has been making an argument for decades that explains the food industry's software better than anything written about the food industry's software.

You can build a doghouse out of whatever is lying around. No plans, no engineering, no real idea what you are doing. Nail some planks together and it stands up, because at that size almost anything stands up.

Now scale it. A doghouse a hundred times bigger falls over. Not because the builder got worse, but because the method never had any structure in it. It was being held up by being small.

The pyramid

There is a way to build big without having any new ideas: brute force.

The Great Pyramid is enormous, it took an enormous number of people an enormous amount of time, and the interior — the part a person can actually stand inside — is almost nothing. It is a mountain of material with a corridor in it.

That is what most large software is. More lines, more people, more process. It gets big. It does not get capable. The ratio between what it cost to build and what it lets you do stays terrible, and no amount of additional effort improves the ratio, because effort was never the constraint.

The arch

Gothic cathedrals are the other answer, and the difference is not effort. It is ideas.

The pointed arch. The rib vault. The flying buttress. Each one is a way of moving load somewhere else, and together they let a comparatively small number of people enclose an astonishing volume of space using a fraction of the stone.

They did not out-work the pyramid builders. They out-thought them.

Where food software sits

Almost all of it is pyramid. A supermarket's stock system, an ERP, a traceability platform. Each is a mountain of bespoke material serving one organisation, and none of it connects to the next one, because there was never an idea in it — only accumulation.

You can hear it in how the industry boasts. Endpoint counts. Module counts. Integration counts. Those are measurements of mass.

Nobody measures mass in a cathedral.

The three fields are the arch

FoodBlock is one primitive with three fields: what a thing is, what is true about it, and what it connects to. A farmer, a tomato, an order, a review, a certification and a delivery are all the same shape.

That is not a simplification made for neatness. It is load-bearing in exactly the way an arch is. Because everything is the same shape, anything can reference anything, and a chain running from a grain of wheat to a loaf on a counter holds together without one bespoke integration anywhere along it.

The test is Kay's test: how much can be enclosed, per unit of material? A format small enough to hand-write in thirty lines, that an entire industry can interoperate on, is a very good ratio.

The uncomfortable part

An arch is harder than a doghouse.

You can start a doghouse today. An arch requires understanding where the load goes before you lay a stone, and then refusing, over and over, to add material that does not carry any.

Every feature that does not fall out of the three fields is a stone that is only weight. That rule takes ten seconds to write down and years to keep.