I’ve been writing commercial software since 1996. Since then the Microsoft API for WIN32 has been extended to support the 64bit platform, but most of everything I learned while writing to that platform is just as applicable now as it was back then.
I’ve written apps for the JIRA SOAP API. They work well; as long as the soap interface doesn’t throw a wobbler. It throws a wobbler every effing day now. The SOAP API for Jira has been deprecated for the newer, shiner, REST API.
Fuck you.
Fuck you and your spurious deprecation of APIs because it’s not something that fits into your grand design.
This is not how you write an API.
Dave Winer had it right many years ago with the RSS API. It was really fucking simple, and I wrote a parser for it in ass-clown perl that worked well for everything I wanted it to do. Even when people started to put incorrect entities in their feeds I could deal with it. It still runs, and I’ve not changed it in over 7 years.
Oh no, they say, look at the major version they say, it keeps incrementing and they only have a limited obligation to support something once the major number increments.
Fuck you.
Version number increments are meaningless. When we have a Firefox 17 in January and a Firefox 23 in August, a Chrome 18 in January and a Chrome 28 in August I mean seriously, you’re making a fucking argument here? Every one of those goddamned browsers can still read HTML. They may not all *render* it the same way, but a <div> is a <div> is a fucking <div>.
One of the most stable APIs in computers is the concept of time(). Time is counted as the number of seconds since 12:00, Jan 1, 1970. Many have written alternative APIs for time, but all of them provide some call that allows you to translate that special structure into a number representing the number of seconds since that point in time. That is an API.
I’m full certain that somewhen in the 40th century, some piece of code will depend on a 64bit version of the time() call, and it will work.
You people have no fucking idea how to write an interface.
There is a reason why they call it an interface, it’s meant to be something you can program against for a reasonable amount of time.
Not like Facebook.