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Are Googlers Too Smart For Their Own Good?
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?"
So, theodp, if you were a developer you would look at this and see a set of interfaces to web services done in a RESTful manner. You would say, "Oh, my users want to use Google storage but they need more of a drag and drop interface." Then you would spend a couple weeks using Ruby on Rails and Scriptaculous to make virtual folders or buckets or whatever your application calls them and using the elegance of RoR with the UI of Scriptaculous so the user can move their photos or data from your server to the cloud or vice versa. You could really use anything you want to interact with it but I would bet these two GPL compatible tools would result in the most rapid of web application development.
So three sentences with links to Google besmirching them for being smart will get you on the frontpage of Slashdot these days? Really the substance of the 'story' here is essentially "WTF?! So complicated it must Suck!"
Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API ...
Here's a final hint: API stands for Application Programming Interface is not supposed to be user-friendly. It's supposed to be developer-friendly. I hope I don't sound like a Google fanboy but this is a nontrivial task and I would defend the API they have produced. The documentation is far more than you would get from a CS PhD. You want me to take notice of your mindless drivel, theodp? Get off your ass, code an interface for this API and then point out how the API and documentation is lacking in a step by step post. That would be helpful and deserve a place in Slashdot's programming section. What you have here is not.
My work here is dung.
They wouldn't call it code.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
In other news: the space shuttle UI is too complicated for regular car drivers! duh.
This isn't to discredit the idea of ease of use or good design - god knows Google graphs requires way more hoops than it should (compare, say, Visifire).
I think it's easy to look at the developer's guide and just flee in terror, but honestly if that's your reaction, Google storage API is probably not the droid you're looking for. If you need simple file sharing that a typical user can appreciate without having to read a manual, Dropbox may be more appropriate; Google Storage API is written with developers in mind.. I'm a big fan of some of Google's APIs, Dropbox, and Google Docs for sure.
UI != API. A proper API doesn't need to be simple, it needs to work properly and consistently. Not to get too subtle, but a complex API for something like this is perfectly fine as long as it is not overly complicated, if you get what I mean.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
I was expecting something really crazy and complex but what I saw was well documented and made sense. Seriously, how on earth is this front page news on slashdot?? I wont repeat the many well made statements that "API's arent for users" above. I'm just surprised this has made it to the front page as a developers link. I sure hope I don't work with the sub. at any point if he thinks this is an example of people being "too smart for their own good". /saddened
jaymz
As the documents point out, it's the same API used for Amazon EC3 and others. They're implementing someone else's protocol.
There's been an awful lot of discussion about what is or isn't simple, and people have gotten a pretty sophisticated notion of simplicity, but I'm not sure it has helped.
-- Ward Cunningham
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I think this is a terrible idea. It violates the principle of "make it as simple as possible, but not any simpler". Some things are just complicated. Even if the UI is nice and clean, what it interacts with is not and the users have to know about that. I don't think any UI could be understood by a 5 year old and I'm fine with that.
What exactly is hard to use or cryptic about a RESTful API? If such a thing strains your brain too much you probably are in the wrong line of work. I'd recommend you get a job flipping burgers but even that may be way more than your intellectually capable of.
As the parent to your post noted: we are talking about an API here. Precisely none of it is user facing.
The tag on the article "submittertoostupid" pretty much says it all here folks.
Got Code?
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
- Brian Kernighan
It seems Googler's may be smart enough for their own good, but not smart enough to debug the cloud
This looks like a nice low-level API for doing really interesting and complicated things. Unfortunately, they neglected to include a high-level API to deal with what will be by far the most common use cases. Sure, it's not so difficult to implement an upload_file(filepointer, uri) function with this, but given the huge proportion of developers using this library that are going to need exactly this sort of function, do we really need all of them reinventing the wheel?
Powerful and complex functionality is good, but the most common use cases got that way for a reason. Specifically accounting for them, even if only through a set of basic frontend functions, brings major productivity boosts to the programmers that use your library. It is a thing worth doing, and it sounds like the Google folks neglected to do that in this case.
ALL of it is user facing. That's the very point of an API. The user is the developer.
This is a very, very important concept. As I said in my other post, this is a good API, a usable API. But so many APIs aren't usable. API usability should ALWAYS be considered when releasing a public library/service.
When someone tries to bash a cleanly designed RESTful interface as being "too complicated", you know it's a sad state of affairs. If this can lead to even one person reading chapter 5 of Fielding's dissertation, maybe some good can come of it after all...
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Fielding
"Developer", meet HTTP..
theodp in this post quotes from a book entitled "The Dumbing-Down of Programming."
Not content with infantilizing the end user, the purveyors of point-and-click seem determined to infantilize the programmer as well.
Judging by this story submission, it turns out he's for it.
Your brain is not a computer.
If you want to know what it's like to be on the other side of that conversation, ask a citizen of the British Empire to explain cricket to you.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sure. But you shouldn't be able to explain Photoshop or vi to a 5 year old, either.
Sure I can. Photoshop lets you paint on pictures, and Vi is like a piece of paper that you can write on.
With an API the difference is that you should be able to assume that your user will have a common lower bound on their knowledge. If your API deals with multi-threading, to be effective you probably need to assume your user knows the fundamentals of multi-threaded programming. Or, at least that the user has some base level of knowledge in computer science.
Attempting to over-simplify a concept to a child limits our ability to develop for things that aren't simple to begin with.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Yes, and paper mills are consumers of raw pine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all the rough edges need to be filed off it first.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If only they had to be worthy of the moniker to get a job...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The “user” of an API is an application programmer. The “user” of a UI in general is your grandmother.
Both of them have to be of just the right complexity... neither unnecessarily complex, nor overly simplistic. If the interface is unnecessarily complex, it will be harder to use; if it is overly simple, it may not be usable at all.
Both of them have to be usable, but an application programmer’s idea of “usable” will be very different from your grandmother’s. Equating the two is silly to the point of being mistaken for trollishness.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.