Designing for coders – APIs
Sunday, February 24th, 2008The stuff of programing is words. Legally, a program is seen in the same light as a book or poem.
When programmers write code to work with other programmers, words are the bridge – words, phrases, “symbols”, significant numbers and so on.
For programmers, working with a program or another system usually means using the program’s API – it’s application programming interface. The API boils down to a set of of words and phrase that somehow describe the program.
API design is one of my favourite not-quite-pass-times. Turning meaningless function names into pithy, neat and meaningful phrases can turn a hellish difficult program into something useful again.
As an aside, I even started a coding dictionary – what’s the difference between “fetch” and “get”? When should you use “do” in a function name?
This screencast is a brilliant insight into how important it is to think about the person using the API. An API is never for the guy who writes the API – it’s for the guy who uses it. Unfortunately, the latter is often forgotten.
See this at google video.
