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Everything I know about good API design

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428 points ahamez | 3 comments | 24 Aug 25 19:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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0xbadcafebee ◴[25 Aug 25 00:47 UTC] No.45009175[source]▶
Most people who see "API" today only think "it's a web app I send a request to, and I pass some arguments and set some headers, then check some settings from the returned headers, then parse some returned data."

But "API" means "Application Programming Interface". It was originally for application programs, which were... programs with user interfaces! It comes from the 1940's originally, and wasn't referred to for much else until 1990. APIs have existed for over 80 years. Books and papers have been published on the subject that are older than many of the people reading this text right now.

What might've those older APIs been like? What were they working with? What was their purpose? How did those programmers solve their problems? How might that be relevant to you?

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1. spacechild1 ◴[25 Aug 25 11:40 UTC] No.45012766[source]▶
You are talking in past tense, but there are still many non-web APIs. Every software library has an API. I still find it incredibly annoying that the web folks have hijacked the term "API" as a short hand for "web API".
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2. stronglikedan ◴[25 Aug 25 17:01 UTC] No.45016022[source]▶
> the web folks have hijacked the term "API" as a short hand for "web API".

I don't see it. API is too vague to mean one type of API, whether it's one from before the web, or a web API. As soon as there was more than one type of API, the term API became incomplete without a qualifier. Nothing was hijacked, and your sentence includes an incomplete term.

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3. spacechild1 ◴[25 Aug 25 20:08 UTC] No.45018385[source]▶
Web devs absolutely do use "API" as a synonym for "web API". I mean, the title of this very submission is "Everything I know about good API design". One could naively expect an article about API design in general, but it's only about web APIs.