The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

So many gems in here but this one about microservices is my favorite:

grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

The network boundary gives you a factoring tool that most language module systems don't: the ability for a collection of packages to cooperate internally but expose only a small API to the rest of the codebase. The fact that it's network further disciplines the modules to exchange only data (not callbacks or behaviors) which simplifies programming, and to evolve their interfaces in backwards compatible ways, which makes it possible to "hot reload" different modules at different times without blowing up.

You could probably get most of this without the literal network hop, but I haven't seen a serious attempt.

Any language that offers a mechanism for libraries has formal or informal support for defining modules with public APIs?

Or maybe I’m missing what you mean - can you explain with an example an API boundary you can’t define by interfaces in Go, Java, C# etc? Or by Protocols in Python?

The service I'm working on right now has about 25 packages. From the language's perspective, each package is a "module" with a "public" API. But from the microservices architecture's perspective, the whole thing is one module with only a few methods.

But why would users of the module care about the dependency packages? You could still have a module with only a few methods and that's the interface.