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by Jared Richardson.
Original Post: Humane Interfaces versus Minimal Interfaces
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There's been quite a fuss about Martin Fowler's post on Humane Interfaces. If I summarize his post for the sake of brevity, a larger, more humanly readable API is preferable to a smaller, more cryptic API.
The discussion seems to be falling into two camps. One side says that if you are a ~real~ developer, you'll invest the time to learn the API. Then, as a skilled user, you'll apply that skill and build something.
The other camp seems to feel that with a human readable API, you just skip the "invest the time to learn the API" and move straight to building something.
Hmmmm...
Spend time learning Yet Another Unique API... or write code.
Spend time bulding a smaller, tighter, cleaner, more cryptic API... or make it easier to understand ~and~ use?
In my experience a team writing an API will spend a minimal amount of time adding these additional API calls. But the performance increase I've seen on the teams using this technique is substantion.
Remeber, the API developers wrote the API code. They know it better than anyone. For them, adding a first() and last() routine will take 30 seconds. Literally. The other option is to force your end users to learn the API well enough to know if the last() call should be list.indexOf(list.size() -1 ) or list.indexOf(list.size()). These bits of arcane, useless trivia should not be force fed to your users. It's just inefficient.
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