The Nature of Software is a serialized essay, an attempt to reconcile Christopher Alexander's 2,500-page magnum opus, The Nature of Order with the craft of software development. Written piecewise, monthly-ish, by Dorian Taylor.
In buildings as in software, there are details that operate at numerous levels of scale. For buildings this plays out in geometry; in software, conceptual space.
If Christopher Alexander's latter-career methodology has a centre, it's the center: a region of space that is differentiated from its surroundings somehow.
This chapter is the first of a cluster I dub the space between centers is also a center. In this case, the boundaries between places themselves have place-ness.
the space between centers is also a center
In the second chapter of the space-between cluster, we examine the analogy between alternating repetition in geometric form and the oscillation between process and structure.
space-between
This is the third and final chapter of the cluster I’m calling the space between centers is also a center. Positive space is when negative space has an identifiable character.
Alexander defined good shape as squat, bilaterally symmetrical and convex, and made up of things that are the same. Making this a meaningful concept for software was something of a heavy lift.
good shape
Alexander argued that a top-down global symmetry didn't help a structure much, but local symmetries, at a scale at which they can be perceived and interacted with by a person on the ground, absolutely do.
Deep Interlock and Ambiguity sounds like precisely the opposite of something you'd want occurring in software. So we're going to have to unpack it.
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