andrep

Rusty's API Design Manifesto

The idea

Application Programming Interface (API) design is hard. But it's even harder to change once you get it wrong. So what you should do is to spend the effort to get it right the first time around.

In the Linux Kernel community Rusty Russell came up with a API rating scheme to help us determine if our API is sensible, or not. It's a rating from -10 to 10, where 10 is perfect is -10 is hell. Unfortunately there are too many examples at the wrong end of the scale.

Rusty's original descriptions

• Descriptions of the positive API levels

andrep

#!/bin/sh -x -e

case "$ARCH" in
    armv6-apple-darwin10|armv7-apple-darwin10|armv7s-apple-darwin10|arm64-apple-darwin10|i386-apple-darwin11)
        ;;
    *)
        cat <<EOF
Must set ARCH environment variable to

armv6-apple-darwin10 = All iOS devices

andrep

module HaskellClosureTest where

strings = ["do", "re", "mi"]

main = do
  let printFunctions = map (\s -> putStrLn s) strings
  -- prints "do, re, mi"
  mapM_ id printFunctions