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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 28 2012 @ 08:47 AM EDT |
Be careful, because "facts" as understood in US copyright law is a
term of art unless I'm sadly mistaken, which may not apply to fictional works.
That said, this does illustrate why I would not care to compare the API to
blueprints. Blueprints actually tell you how to build something. The API just
describes the outside of our black box. It hides the entire interior, so that
we're free to replace it without changing a lot of other things. I mean, a lot
of programming simply boils down to making sure that changes don't spiral out of
control, such that making one small change here requires dozens more changes
which in turn require even more changes, until you're practically rewriting your
whole program over one little bug. Encapsulation like this hopefully helps keep
it so that you don't need many changes.
As this implies, you can have an API and be told what something does while
having no idea how it does it. Suppose I gave you an API for an AI that took in
a string and returned another string with the AI's response to a Jeopardy
question. That would fully describe the API, but it wouldn't help you build a
machine like that at all. You'd have to ask IBM how they did it or figure out a
way to build your own.
Which Google did, of course, in spite of using the same APIs for compatibility.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: PJ on Saturday, April 28 2012 @ 05:42 PM EDT |
| Thanks very much! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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