Thread by @conways_law

@antlerboy You asked for a comment on interfaces.
Here is a particularly idiosyncratic one. The mindset behind Conway’s Law is that, in a design or construction activity, there are two communities: the “artisans” (designers, builders) and their “artifacts” (designs, things).
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The trick is to keep them in mind together because there is an important mapping that runs from artifacts to artisans: “designed-by” or “built-by”.

This side-by-side thinking has led to the notion of the “cross-jargon interface”.
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This is an interface between two communities of artisans who don’t understand each other’s languages, that permits them to build joint artifacts. The jackpot example is the stored-program-computer instruction set, described by John von Neumann and others in 1945.
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It led to the creation of a software industry:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neuma…

The mathematicians who understood algorithms didn’t understand digital logic, and the digital logic designers could not be bothered with building single-problem computers,...
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although a few hybrids were built for high-payoff problems such as computing artillery tables. You’ll see a discussion of this in the three slides beginning at
melconway.com/talks/2019_con…
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The von Neumann invention represented computer control as data stored in the same memory as the user’s problem: the program. That enabled the mathematicians with their problems to build data sets that ran the computer. Result: a software industry.
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The cross-jargon interface enables synergy between two otherwise non-interacting communities. Once one starts looking for them elsewhere they begin to appear, for example the standardized automobile driver’s operating interface. Many have led to new industries.
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@antlerboy @pdfmakerapp grab this

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