Martin Fowler has recently published on his “bliki” (a hybrid between a blog and a wiki) a very interesting article regarding two different approaches to API design: “Humane Interface” and “Minimal Interface”. The article spurred quite a discussion – the links to different follow-ups are at the end of the original post. A summary of the debate may be found here.
Personally, I incline towards Humane Interfaces. No doubt it’s harder to come up with just the right set of methods when you design such API, and the maintenance is more difficult, but for the user it is a real blessing. It goes very well with my principle: everything should be possible to do, and common tasks should be simple to do. Basically, this is the same idea I was talking about when writing on Java date and time classes.
According to Fowler, the term “Humane Interface” is very popular among the rubyists – one more reason to learn Ruby! I have more than enough of the reasons to do it now – the only remaining question is where to find the time for it…
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