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Are Googlers Too Smart For Their Own Good?

Posted by kdawson on from the keep-it-complicated-smarty dept.

theodp writes "If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s, Google Storage even manages to overcomplicate the simple act of copying files. Which raises the question: Are Googlers with 'world-class programming skills' capable of producing straightforward, simple-to-use programming interfaces for ordinary humans?"

1 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers" by fusiongyro · · Score: 4, Informative

    Granted, this story is grandstanding. But still, this is what you have to do to copy from the article:

    • "Create source and destination URIs."
    • "Create new destination URI with the source object name as the destination object name." (clone_replace_name)
    • "Create a new destination key object."
    • "Retrieve the source key and create a source key object."
    • "Create a temporary file to hold our copy operation."
    • "Copy the file."

    That seems like a lot of steps, and a couple of them seem very strange to me, namely the clone_replace_name.

    I agree that complex tasks require complex APIs. I just don't see why this is such a complex task. We're not using SSL, namespaces or storing a gigantic file here, and I don't see any reason why those features should make the process that much harder. If you want to store large data in the cloud, why should it be so much harder than storing data on a regular filesystem? You don't have "namespaces" on the filesystem, just folders and they just work. SSL "just works." Large files are not intrinsically different from small files. There aren't any ACLs in this example. Where's the complexity? Shouldn't simple things be simple?

    The answer is because the cloud is ultimately about marketing and selling expensive crap to enterprises that don't need it, so a burdensome API is just another way of making things that should be cheap more expensive. Expensive developers up on their marketing will get to charge 5x as much because it will take them 5x as much work to do simple things. "Everyone wins."