[BangPypers] API: Design Matters

[Dorai Thodla]

Anand,
I found that this is one of the most difficult things to do well. Triggered
by this post I did some Googling and read a couple of others. I am posting a
link to the Google presentation which is probably one of the best.

http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf

Dorai
www.thodla.com




On Jan 2, 2008 10:15 AM, Anand Balachandran Pillai <abpillai at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Nice post. Talking about APIs, I used to find Win32 APIs as the most
> horrible in terms of number of parameters they take and the obscure
> name of the params.
>
> I did not know that .NET APIs suffer from similar issues. The Select
> API mentioned in the article seems to be very horribly designed and
> not well thought of.
>
> Some people think that if they just preserve the arguments and order
> of arguments in an API as is the usual accepted form of it, that is
> enough. For example this Select(...) API does it since it kind of
> retains the "form" of its UNIX select(...) function call (except for
> using an integer instead of a structure for the timeout argument,
> which is a crime!) . But it is modifying the "semantics" of the API in
> terms of how it modifies its arguments. It is not just important to
> retain the "form" but also the "semantics" of an API to make it easy
> to use.
>
> --Anand
>
> On Jan 1, 2008 10:24 AM, Dorai Thodla <dorai at thodla.com> wrote:
> > This may be a good topic for discussion.
> >
> > Why changing APIs might become a criminal offense - Should the authors
> of
> > lousy APIs be held accountable for their crimes?
> >
> http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=488&page=1
> >
> >
> > --
> > Dorai Thodla (http://www.thodla.com)
> > US: 650-206-2688
> >  India: 98408 89258
> > _______________________________________________
> > BangPypers mailing list
> > BangPypers at python.org
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> -Anand
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Dorai Thodla (http://www.thodla.com)
US: 650-206-2688
India: 98408 89258
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