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Tangled Up in Tools: What's wrong with libraries and what to do about it (pragprog.com)
18 points by malyk on April 7, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


I'm halfway through this post...and famished.


Is the TLDR: Have smaller API's for your libraries?


Not exactly. I only skimmed it (and yep, the sushi looked good :-), and mostly looked at his second point, which is more like keeping the scope of your APIs small.

To use a delightful term from Ted Nelson, you very much want to limit how the parts of your system are intertwingled (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity). The less you have to juggle in your head at once, the better; he connected this to flow (quoting Joel S.) ... I'd put it "the less deep you have to get into flow the better".

Or to quote Brooks, limit accidental complexity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet).




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