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| Authored by: jesse on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 11:03 AM EDT |
It can also be a failure of the philosophy.
UNIX philosophy is to keep things simple, do one thing and do it well.
Unfortunately, a lot of developers tend to get carried away.
Libraries are not glamorous. The code is not frequently looked at, and is
frequently considered boring.
So to make things more "interesting" designers tend to try to make
them do everything, and add lots of functions and more functionality to the
routines in a library... which in turn makes them complx, and hard to use.
And that causes other developers to reimplement functions buried in existing
libraries...[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: mexaly on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 11:37 AM EDT |
Someone (Reinhold?) said that his API work affects thousands of engineers and
millions of hours of programming labor. I agree. That's where the artistry
comes into API design.
There are an infinite number of ways to choose the names and numbers that embody
the specification, but a small subset are meaningful to both machines and
people. A talented software engineer can choose names and numbers that resonate
with other engineers in synergistic ways.
Once everyone is resonating on the same API, writing it down is moot, except
that it engages archaic copyright laws.
---
IANAL, but I watch actors play lawyers on high-definition television.
Thanks to our hosts and the legal experts that make Groklaw great.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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