
CommunityNews
How to design a good API and why it matters (2006)
ABSTRACT
In lieu of a traditional , I’ve tried to distill the essence of the talk into a collection of maxims:
- All programmers are API designers. Good programs are modular, and intermodular boundaries define APIs. Good modules get reused.
- APIs can be among your greatest assets or liabilities. Good APIs create long-term customers; bad ones create long-term support nightmares.
- Public APIs, like diamonds, are forever. You have one chance to get it right so give it your best.
- APIs should be easy to use and hard to misuse. It should be easy to do simple things; possible to do complex things; and impossible, or at least difficult, to do wrong things.
- APIs should be self-documenting: It should rarely require documentation to read code written to a good API. In fact, it should rarely require documentation to write it…
Read in full here:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1176617.1176622
This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.
Most Liked

apsori
This is a very good and exhaustive list of principles to guide a junior programmer, such as myself. I only learned programming through self-study.
1
Popular General Dev topics

F# Is The Best Coding Language Today.
If you want to personally pick up a programming language in order to become a better coder in what...
New

Mediocre typing feel overshadows reliable wireless and fantastic battery life.
New

It’s not what programming languages do, it’s what they shepherd you to.
How many of you have listened, read or taken part in a discussio...
New

Flipper Zero is a portable multi-tool for pentesters and geeks in a toy-like body. It loves hacking digital stuff, such as radio protocol...
New

Raspberry Pi security alarm — the basics.
In November last year — I started building a DIY security alarm system, using a Raspberry Pi a...
New

The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry.
Highly sought after, rarely provided.
New

Apple Patents Suggest Future AirPods Could Monitor Biosignals & Brain Activity - AppleMagazine.
The US Patent & Trademark Office...
New

Dark mode isn’t as good for your eyes as you believe.
The shadowy display mode has leagues of fans claiming it helps reduce eye strain, ...
New

On the benefits of learning in public.
Learning in public helps me grow as an engineer and seems to benefit others too. Here’s why I sho...
New

New
Other popular topics

I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New

No chair. I have a standing desk.
This post was split into a dedicated thread from our thread about chairs :slight_smile:
New

Curious to know which languages and frameworks you’re all thinking about learning next :upside_down_face:
Perhaps if there’s enough peop...
New

Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New

Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New

The V Programming Language
Simple language for building maintainable programs
V is already mentioned couple of times in the forum, but I...
New

Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework.
Brian Okken @brianokken
Edited by Kat...
New

Author Spotlight
Dmitry Zinoviev
@aqsaqal
Today we’re putting our spotlight on Dmitry Zinoviev, author of Data Science Essentials in ...
New

Author Spotlight
Erin Dees
@undees
Welcome to our new author spotlight! We had the pleasure of chatting with Erin Dees, co-author of ...
New

Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New
Categories:
Sub Categories:
- All
- In The News
- Dev Chat (201)
- Questions (32)
- Resources (118)
- Blogs/Talks (26)
- Jobs (3)
- Events (15)
- Code Editors (58)
- Hardware (57)
- Reviews (5)
- Sales (15)
- Design & UX (4)
- Marketing & SEO (1)
- Industry & Culture (14)
- Ethics & Privacy (19)
- Business (4)
- Learning Methods (4)
- Content Creators (7)
- DevOps & Hosting (9)
Popular Portals
- /elixir
- /rust
- /wasm
- /ruby
- /erlang
- /phoenix
- /keyboards
- /rails
- /js
- /python
- /security
- /go
- /swift
- /vim
- /clojure
- /emacs
- /haskell
- /java
- /onivim
- /svelte
- /typescript
- /crystal
- /kotlin
- /c-plus-plus
- /tailwind
- /gleam
- /ocaml
- /react
- /elm
- /flutter
- /vscode
- /ash
- /opensuse
- /centos
- /html
- /php
- /deepseek
- /zig
- /scala
- /textmate
- /lisp
- /sublime-text
- /nixos
- /debian
- /react-native
- /agda
- /kubuntu
- /arch-linux
- /revery
- /django
- /ubuntu
- /spring
- /manjaro
- /nodejs
- /diversity
- /lua
- /julia
- /slackware
- /c
- /neovim