| I Googled the quote. It's from
this
article. I see what you are saying and I agree with you. OTOH, I can't
fault PJ's friend too much for starting with a simpler explanation that just
includes the signatures and not the meanings. If I were asked by a
non-technical person to explain what an API is I would probably use an
explanation similar to what PJ's friend used, trying to distinguish the API from
the library that implements the API. Sometimes the best explanation is not the
same thing as the best definition.
I agree with you that the meanings are
an important part of an API. This is a subtle point that many people will miss
on their first attempt at pinning down what an API actually is. I tried to
explain this in early March in a post called
an
API is an instruction set but it was not well received. My point was that
once you see that at its core an API is a mapping between signatures and
meanings then there are other things such as instruction sets that have this
same general form. I still don't understand why I failed so badly when I tried
to communicate this idea.
---
Our job is to remind ourselves that
there are more contexts than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is
reality.
-- Alan Kay [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
| 
