TL;DR: First-class models with branching and merging capabilities represent an almost entirely unused enormous productivity and expressiveness unlock in programming and computer systems.
The Current State: Well-Designed Systems, Constrained Users
Imagine you’re building an accounting system from scratch. You’d design it properly: a normalized database schema, algebraically defined operations for debits and credits, account reconciliation, and comparison functions. You’d implement data-only, invariant-preserving operations using database functions and procedures, with clean authorization models. The result would be a database perfectly customized for accounting, supporting multiple simultaneous client interfaces in any language.
This represents the current state of the art—and it’s genuinely good architecture.
But now put yourself in the shoes of the users: knowledge workers, engineers, analysts who depend on this beautifully designed system. Despite having access to well-structured data and operations, they face a fundamental limitation when it comes to the kind of thinking their work actually requires.
The Hypothesis Gap
Consider an engineer working on a project management system. They’re constantly asking computational questions that our current systems simply don’t support:
- What if I replace this supplier with one offering different prices?
- If I increase this capacity parameter, how much larger does the engine room need to be? How much more cement do we need?
- Would using a different manufacturing process have significantly changed our profitability last year?
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