A lot has been written about how to design a good user interface, but very little about how to design a good programming interface (API: Application Program Interface, or a library). This is somewhat surprising, since an API is nothing more than an UI for programmers, and programmers are normally good at writing tools for each other.
I got stuck debugging someone else’s Perl code today, and it was chock-full of the sorts of things that annoy the piss out of those of us who know better.
I’ve started learning this
thing. which allows you to do cool things like
Google Maps
and the
U Wisconsin directory search.
Recently, a coworker whipped up a Perl script that’ll build all of the
Perl modules we support. This is useful for when we add a new
supported OS or OS version. This script takes a config file, moduledefs, which lists the modules to build, as well as various quirks that affect how and whether the modules should be built. moduledefs is itself a `require‘d Perl script: