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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...
Soooo, like, some software is hard to use?
Maybe it's the pills I'm on, maybe it's the lack of caffeine, but could someone maybe explain the point of this article to me?
crazy dynamite monkey
In other news: the space shuttle UI is too complicated for regular car drivers! duh.
Whatever happened to simple interfaces, like:
"Would you like to play Global Thermonuclear War? [YES|NO]"
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The only nonintuitive thing is the name "bucket", which might be better called "zone" or "filesystem". Other than that, it looks like it provides just about what I'd expect of a high-level filesystem representation.
Sheesh, just think about what the complaints would be if they provided something closer to VFS-type mappings so people ended up commonly rewriting half of FUSE to get their data where they like.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Since when does an API need to be user friendly? I found Google's documentation much more user friendly and straightforward than say Microsoft's .NET documentation on File I/O. It's not an end-user product. Just skimming over the contents of the linked sites, it seems very easy to use even if you're not an advanced programmer. If you don't understand what's on those websites after some thorough reading, please hand in your geek card.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
Something not understood by Slashdotter! Film at 11.
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.
If this a storage system to be used as a filesystem, why does it need a API? Write a OS filesystem driver then everything can use it. Easy enough to do in userspace with FUSE on Linux/BSD/OSX and Dokan on Windows. Everything is a filesystem, and this really seams to be a filesystem, so make it a filesystem. But maybe I'm missing something here.....
who flood developer-boards with questions that typically look like
" Sir Sir please help sir I have project due sir I need full workking code by tomorrow sir" ??
If so, you would expect everything to be point and click, I guess.
Just a quick FYI, API does not mean UI. I noticed some of the slashdotters were conflating the two.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
Seriously, Google has a number of products with extremely simple, user friendly interfaces. Their search engine, you know, the reason that they are who they are, the reason that anyone knows about them, is a prime example. Type in what you want, it finds what you need. No special syntax needed, no complex logical operations to try and get results, just key in terms or phrases and you get good results.
What kind of question is that?
You could just set your filter for "mere mortal" appropriately and you won't see these things anymore.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Holy shit, you just called GMail a complicated interface? Despite it being nearly exactly the same as every single other webmail interface?
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.
The mere existence of DroidDraw would indicate "no".
Things become much more complicated then first impression when you try to really explain something. For example I went to a football game with a group of Chinese grad students and they asked me how a team can score points. I thought to myself this is easy, and began to explain the rules.
1. Touchdowns are worth 7 points... err they are worth 6 points technically
2. After a touchdown the scoring team can decide to kick the ball through the uprights for 1 point
Or
3. The scoring team can decide to run another regular play and if they enter the end-zone again on that 1 play they get 2 points.
4. Fields goals are 3 points and are scored when the team on offense can kick the ball through the uprights.
5. The defense can score points if they can tackle an offensive player in the end-zone while they are holding the football. The defensive team then gets 2 points and gets the ball kicked to them on the following play instead of the normal system where the scoring team kicks the ball to the other team.
6. If the defense can steal the ball and run into the end-zone they are facing then it is a touchdown and rule 2 and 3 apply.
By the end of this discussion they were more confused then when we started. So when you say how hard can it be to explain how to store a file questions like.
1. How to delete?
2. How to rename?
3. How to create folders or other organizational structures?
4. How to move items between organizational structures?
5. How to copy an item already in storage?
6. How to download multiple files?
7. Can security be set or changed?
8. Oh yeah and how to I upload a file in the first place?
The more precision you apply to a discussion the more complicated they tend to get. Just like a touchdown is 7 points is easier to understand, upload a file is easy too.
As the parent to your post noted: we are talking about an API here. Precisely none of it is user facing.
Are Googlers Too Smart For Their Own Good?
No.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
After skimming the file-copying code, I agree with the people who say it's not complicated. I'm not a Python programmer either. The example functions they gave look like good starting points for wrappers that would provide the higher level, "get, send, delete" sort of functionality the poster wants. The only thing that confuses me is why you have to have "config = boto.config" when the config variable isn't used in the rest of the code. To me, it looks like you're only interested in the side effects of retrieving the configuration and not the result. Couldn't you just "boto.config()" or something at program startup? Of course that's probably more of a Python question from somebody who is ony passably familiar with the language. It's nothing complicated about the API.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
On the short its an api and not for general user consumption.
The fact that non developers are even talking about this is a problematic symptom of our industry's current overexposure with respect libraries, OSs, dev tools etc....
We have invited the media and everyone else to our internal conflict over things that they should really have no interest in with our current infighting and ranting about mobile tech and the mobile market.
Its are fault that non technical people are commenting on whether or not apis are "user friendly". We invited the world to our dysfunction.
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.
I tend to think of your taxonomy in terms of design outcomes:
4. Sufficiently engineered
3. Over-engineered
2. Under-engineered
1. Doesn't work or works on accident.
That is to say, average developers tend to nail the common case, but lack the experience or knowledge to spot the corner cases. Your "above average" developer wants to demonstrate his knowledge by optimizing for as many corner cases as possible at the expense of simplicity in the common case. The well-above average developer can balance the common and the exceptional.
Both over and under-engineered solutions are "bad," but the under-engineered solution usually has the advantage of less code to delete when you have to redesign everything. :)
Seriously, how on earth is this front page news on slashdot??
One word: kdawson.
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.
Google has just put the best holiday logo ever on the homepage. A working PacMan! I wonder what's the worldwide economic impact of this joke, in terms of lost productivity. It probably beats most terrorist acts and natural disasters :).
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Last time I checked, the Google search page was pretty straightforward. For more complicated systems, get set up on Google Voice. I'm so used to phone-tree hell that I was pretty stunned with how quick and painless that was. They are happy to put user experience as a primary concern when they're trying to acquire users. For a storage API, frankly having granddad want to try it out might not be in their interests.
Oh god don't mention yahoo mail as better then g-mail. It's search function randomly breaks. I mean it just stops searching. I submitted the bug to them and they basically said "Yeah that happens, we'll poke the database from the back end and see if it clears up." Now every time I search for something I have to wonder if what I'm looking for isn't there, or did my search break silently again? Even on the user interface side it's annoying, the what's new tab you can't close. If you accidentally shrink your preview frame it starts opening all mail in new tabs. It's just generally ugly and trying hard to be unintuitive as a webmail app can be.
I'm both, so should I be able to or not be able to understand the API? It all makes perfect sense to me.
"If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"
This is about developers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zEQhhaJsU4
The word you are looking for is "able", not "supposed".
Because, letters in the alphabet are "a code" but we don't refer to them as "codes for wording".
So, everyone who is familiar with "the code" used IS supposed to understand it. Regardless if we are talking alphabet, kanji, C++ or Python.
Unless it is poorly coded and/or a mess - which is a part of the reason why the OP questions the current practice.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Are you just simply way too “dumb”* for the 21st-fuckin-century?
I know I’m (sadly) a minority here. And I know that I will probably get modded to into oblivion. But except from the stupid overengineering... come on!
How about for a change actually learning something, when it is useful for you?
* I’m not even really saying that people are too dumb. It’s just that most people grew up in a culture, where it made more sense, to complain and feel entitled, to getting spoon-fed, than to understand it themselves. Where intelligent people get hate, and dumb people get special treatment (e.g. it not being allowed to point out that fact about their mental performance).
So naturally, they choose the more efficient way.
But the thing is, that we all are very much capable of grasping those complex concepts that we always say we were too dumb for. It’s just an excuse. And the more it is used, the more mental growth we miss. So after some time, we really have a hard time using our brains. Just like with a muscle. Just like we all are born with the ability to some day run for hours, every day, in the heat.
So, no, they are not too smart. We’re just used to being lazy as hell.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
mind reading the Whole thing??
like i said user facing stuff should be at the five year old level
API stuff should be at the level of a 7 year old (with documents)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Now I won't get any freakin' work done today.
How's today any different, AC? I see you posting on Slashdot all day long.
Your comment reminded me of this story:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-The-Complicators-Gloves.aspx
A mighty fine story about overcomplication :)
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Well, if you've good karma you can switch ad's off and I'd say a lot of the technical audience slashdot attracts is probably adblocking too whilst their at it, but regardless of that...
I don't mind provocative posts, but completely misguided posts are another thing. Slashdots appeal is that its meant to be news for nerds, if more stuff like this makes it through the quality and returning visits from the very people slashdot attracts and therefore can provide that extra value as a platform for its advertisers will go down with time. As a niche news site it would be in slashdots interest surely to continue to attract the sort of people that the targetted ad's are aimed at not dumb itself down to yet another "regular" tech site.
Re-reading that, I admit thats probably already happened for a lot of people but I still think of slashdot as a higher-than-normal tech site. Just about.
jaymz
The Editard's Editard. At this point I really think we can class him as either an honest-to-God moron, or a really clever troll. I mean, we bite every time.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
API = Application Programming Interface
UI = User Interface
I think you’re confusing “Application Programmers” with “Users”.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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..
They ARE the users of the piece of code that Google has released. And Google has every reason to want to make their code understandable, usable, and clear. I believe that in this case they have done so, but to claim that application programmers aren't "users" of library code is just bizarre and illogical. The only interface to this code is the API. The only users of that API are the application programmers. UI != GUI.
No, the user is the user. When *users* post to Twitter with a shiny GUI they don't even have to know that the Twitter API exists, what it is, what its methods are, etc.
After reading through the API, if anything, it's too simple. You can't copy a bucket without reading it from Google's servers and writing it back, which is far slower than a copy carried out within their high-speed network. The "list" capability isn't well documented. The security model is about as dumb as the UNIX/Linux one; it doesn't have capabilities or anything like that. Bucket transactions are themselves atomic, but there are no user-specified atomic transactions. You can't, for example, rename "current" to "old" and "new" to "current" as an atomic transaction. (That's a normal operation in SQL, and a useful one when you've constructed a new copy of a mostly-static table and want to make it live.) Nor do buckets have version management. There's no way to read replication status; although bucket data is supposedly replicated, when does this happen? Right after uploading a bucket, or some time later?
You’re kidding, right?
If you stick to one tag per e-mail, tags are functionally identical to folders. How is that so complicated?
Plus, you can search through your e-mails with basically the same high-powered search that you use for Google web searches.
To put the final nail in the coffin, I’ve found its spam filtering to be nearly bulletproof, and simultaneously being exceptionally good about not putting legit messages in the spam folder. I don’t even check it anymore.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
ALL of it is user facing. That's the very point of an API. The user is the developer.
In which case, being able to explain it to a 5-year old child is pointless, since that's nowhere near the lowest common denominator for software development.
Perhaps it should be explainable to a CS undergrad, but not a child.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Sure. But you shouldn't be able to explain Photoshop or vi to a 5 year old, either. Nobody would deny that they have UIs.
ALL of it is user facing. That's the very point of an API. The user is the developer.
Yes, developers are "users" of APIs. But any "developer" worthy of that moniker has an assumed baseline of specialized domain knowledge *far* greater than any 5 or 7 year old.
Yes, there can and should be will be high-level framework APIs that mask inner complexity for straightforward use cases. The open source web world is littered with such things. See "idiomatic" Ruby and Python libraries that wrap native (OS/REST/etc.) counterparts. See what MS did with C#-based APIs that wrap many of the hellish old direct Win32 calls. Sometimes an early design is refined by experience into a simpler one (cf. Plan9's dial() API versus bind/accept/listen).
But sometimes you've just got to give access right down to the metal -- the problem domain is truly complex, and oversimplification of that simply makes users' lives much, much worse.
Pay someone to abstract it for your particular domain. If the API works and has solid corresponding documentation, you shouldn't have a reason to complain.
How the hell did I get modded -1, Offtopic on this!?
*sigh*
That’s what you get when you mix the ex-taxi-driver “web designer” with the typical consultant: A Paula Bean.
Brillant!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If the API CAN be simpler it SHOULD be simpler.
I agree. It's pretty bad.
A programming language should make common operations simple, and other operations possible.
Any implementation of copying files that doesn't follow the form, "CopyFile (source, destination)" is probably a de facto fail.
Worse, if it can be abstracted into code like this, and isn't, it only indicates naivety on the part of the developers as to the mechanics of human behavior, and more likely than not, the kind of arrogant, lazy, slacker mentality that's worthy only of contempt.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It may seem a bit hilarious, apparently this kind of crap (like having bucket names conform to DNS) happens when you want to use web services as your OS. Not too hard if you just implement this once.
This bit is just silly, good for giggles but are they serious about requiring zone editing to expose a database table? Nooooo....
I didn't quite catch how you copy data to other domains, since it looks like you use a gs:// prefix to reach google storage but you say gs://cats and it is still in your account not at google's root server.. kind of annoying though maybe there's a way around it?
I think the 1024 byte limit is totally bogus, that's pretty short if it has to hold the URI path through your virtually nested buckets. Although I've seen Windows flake out at 255 character paths.. That and the bit about a "flat hierarchy", which is an oxymoron, and how you can't nest buckets but you can do so "virtually" by putting slashes in your bucket names, as if it isn't just a normal URI, they're just joshing you, a little bit of fun y'know. "Bare metal" indeed, more like stripping the metaphor down to bare CGI.
It is funny you have to allocate your own temporary file as a buffer for uploading a file, though of course that's what happens in Perl CGI. Which then makes you wonder why you cannot set a max upload data size for your app.. Of course the GSUtil command line tool looks pretty simple.
Otherwise, Animats' post is to right to the point. It isn't really that great. Kind of a bare minimum is more like it. And they stick with REST... so you should hope for a nearby library to exist that will save you not have to start implementing wierd HTTP verbs.. you have to really want this as implementing it seems as much fun as pulling teeth slowly.
Guess? You didn't say anything about the design of Google's Storage API. (Which is fine by me, since the basic premise of this thread is stupid. The storage API is designed to match the S3 API, and isn't targeting end-users in the first place.)
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!
Guess? You didn't say anything about the design of Google's Storage API. (Which is fine by me, since the basic premise of this thread is stupid. The storage API is designed to match the S3 API, and isn't targeting end-users in the first place.)
The headline is "Are Googlers Too Smart For Their Own Good?". My comment goes to the very heart of that, by suggesting above average developers can actually be a problem. It's entirely on topic!
Whoever moderated me -1, Offtopic is just plain wrong. It was an incorrect moderation.
I wonder if Google Storage can be abused as a way to host phishing pages?
There's a phishing page that's been on Google Sites since February. Google is good about kicking off most phishing pages, but this one is different. Here's the phishing page as a web page. The actual hostile page (which is a bogus login page for Stickam) is on the "Click here to download your attachment". The actual url is http://2699962600425641406-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/stickamcomlogindo/login.html?attachauth=ANoY7cpc6fembideFQyYULstnVDU-XMkgwzNLFkUv77Suh8bUq_LGrFRQ-RtLkw6pEPJb5Vk0XW4JMbOVQtqT_R6CjNCh5N2r29quoFkE5Cq1XQXUFhuegVtr4kQUMN9T3dT3yO1q-FthiahDl45UqMmFfD6gKSYwQP4bsgVoM-N5cQN0hHRvDZskuvmTdy0lqnQqUhmKFYP&attredirects=0. That's probably a page in Google Storage.
This raises the question of whether Google should be running hostile-code checks on publicly-accessible Google Storage pages.
Why would anyone take advice from a guy with an AOL email?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Whoever modded this troll is a troll.
I think that's the point though. In a world where complicated is the norm yet we (claim to) want to bring computing to the masses, releasing a new service with yet another complex api seems counter to our goals (I say "complicated" in terms of volume, not in time-to-learn for someone familiar with APIs).
This is the company that brought real, effective search to the masses and collaborative document authoring/editing to companies full of PHBs. Google knows how to make complex things simple for the user. So given all this, I think the argument is rather the old standby: Do we need another X? In this case, do we need another cloud storage solution with nothing but APIs? S3 was bad enough. I don't see anything differentiating this service.... yet.
Sony ha
Absolutely. However, that does not mean that an API HAS to be simple to be good.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
This isn't correct. a UI is a human / machine interface. An API is a machine / machine interface which is implemented by a human. The documentation for the API is more properly compared to UI.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Mike McConnel would disagree with you, and so would I. It's covered in "Code Complete", somewhere. The analogy he uses refers to coffee machines, IIRC.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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."
Have you ever looked at how WebDAV works ? It's more complicated and I don't think it's very fast.
I really don't like how they put paths in the XML either, that's just stupid, if you have a proxy, it shouldn't look at the content, just the method/URL and know what is it's for.
New things are always on the horizon
In fairness, I think they did it because I've disagreed with multiple people on this story. I guess it's almost vaguely trollish, but I think they just disliked my argument.
Oh wow. So you say "GMail is complicated" when you mean "When GMail was first introduced it was complicated, but now it's OK." You know, like every product that leaves BETA.
There is a difference between user and end user. So that's a valid argument, even if you admit you were trolling, at least vaguely.
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise. - Bertrand Russell
Developing good interfaces and good APIs is harder that you think. This maybe isn't Google finest code but it is not amateur hour either. They may need to bring in some "senior-Google-talent" but for first crack this is not bad.
Lay off these guys unless you can go it better.
Simple: kdawson.
"Go forth, and be excellent to each other" --Bill & Ted
Well, I'm not saying I WAS trolling. I was arguing completely intellectually honestly. But I could see why someone might misinterpret.
The headline is "Are Googlers Too Smart For Their Own Good?". My comment goes to the very heart of that...
Well there's your problem. You've mistaken assumed that the title is in any way related to the summary, or that either of those are in any way related to the article.
Well there's your problem. You've mistaken assumed that the title is in any way related to the summary, or that either of those are in any way related to the article.
Heh, yep. My mistake. :)
Be careful with those -ly(s). That looks suspicious.
You're complaining that the API for Google Storage for Developers isn't user-friendly?
This is for developers writing web apps requiring guarantees of security, synchronization, reliability, etc. It's not supposed to be a more "legit" version of Dropbox.
Agreed. To quote Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
that would be Steve McConnell. No idea who Mike is.
If you're looking for a way cool way to store and share (or not share) you code/files, just check out Dropbox. It just works!
Reason: Works for me. Comment: Nice API and easy to understand too.
The bigger question, really, is how come if somebody thought that that list of steps to copy a file was good enough to be an example of how to perform a simple task using the API, then why aren't those steps encapsulated as a reusable function that just gets called with the source, the destination and the objects to copy.
It just strikes me as programming at the wrong level of abstraction--which is, quite frankly, the most common flaw of programmers everywhere.
Are you adequate?
No, the abstractions and conceptual models used by an API to make itself understandable to programmers are perfectly analogous to a UI in the narrow sense you're insisting. The machine doesn't care what abstractions the API uses to make problem solving easier for developers.
Are you adequate?
Developer is the user relative to the API (and also compiler, IDE, and other development tools). What's so hard to grasp about this concept?
It's not like God has ordained that there shall be users, and developers, and never shall they mix.
Paper mills aren't people. Developers are people. Every single bit that is applicable to user-centric design of UIs is equally applicable to user-centric design of APIs. Of course, you have to account for differences in qualifications etc - developers are expected to understand certain things in advance, have better analytical thinking, etc - but the basic principles are all the same.
When you forgo that, you get something like early Win32 APIs.
I sometimes hire people to work in my programming group. If you have a PhD, you have to work EXTRA hard in the interview to prove to me you can do useful work. Over the nearly two decades I've hired programmers, I've generally been most impressed by the work of former auto mechanics who taught themselves to program, and had a passion for it, rather than people with advanced degrees from Ivy-league schools.
I cannot tell you how many times I have had a tricky problem to delegate, one that I have some ideas how to implement. Invariably, the PhD will tell me it can't be done, can't be done well, or will offer to write up a whitepaper explaining why it's a bad idea to try(!) ... while the mechanic rolls up his sleeves, pulls an allnighter or three, and in the end has something ugly and fragile -- but that basically works, and buys time for the next iteration.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
Of course, you have to account for differences in qualifications etc - developers are expected to understand certain things in advance, have better analytical thinking, etc
That’s exactly what I was trying to point out. See also here.
Low Ranked Craig put it pretty well, actually.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I couldn't agree more with your posts. Every second rate developer today is so fucking happy that he is riding the New Wave[tm] of hired mainframe^W^Wcloud computing that he will do anything to sing praise for its convoluted bullshit. Our new profession has become just another conspiracy against the laity, and none more than Google likes to act as the provider of/gatekeeper to such exclusive brilliance.
Xerox had it right in the '70s: the programming environment was just another part of the general UI. If a 10 year old kid couldn't cope with writing apps as easily as he could use apps, the environment was a failure. If the API wasn't intuitive as the rest of the UI was intuitive, the environment was a failure. But Google would never dream of Xerox's level of code openness and simplicity because it makes its money from secrecy of its information and promiscuity of yours. Google would be nothing if it didn't jealously guard its AdWords, PageRank, distributed storage, etc. algorithms; it would be nothing if you didn't give so much information to Google while expecting none of Google's information in return. Remember, you're just too stupid to understand it anyway.
Hm, Google and Apple really need to merge... although at least Apple fanboys tend to like what Apple provides rather than what Apple merely promises. I practically fell over laughing when I saw Amazon S3's pricing, especially having found out first and second hand just how reliable their cloud really isn't - what is the appeal of this rubbish? No, I think I understand it: developers don't understand how to build a system themselves, but no-one ever got fired from buying from the large corporation, so you shift the blame to them... and then, when you're implicitly admitting to ignorance and the need to outsource, you're ostensibly claiming how smart you are that you understand how to call a web service.
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... and more blah blah...
The fact that you erroneously mix user-friendly with API tells me you are not a developer, or at least not one worth listening to when it comes to API design. And the fact that you state we should not expect better from a bunch of computer science Ph.Ds is an indication of projection and ignorance. What do you know about Ph.Ds? About their work and what they do? Did posting that generalization made you feel good about your webby education?
Seriously, if you were really that serious (and intellectually/professionally) capable of, you should have broken down the problem and shown a better alternative. But you didn't. You can't. So shut up.
I've just read the GSfD documentation, and the API is exactly the same as that of Amazon S3, which has been comfortably used by developers and web designers for years now.
Why was this story approved?
Yes, but a developer is presumed to know something about APIs. It seems odd to me that any good can come of development by a developer that can't even understand a simple API. From what I saw on the site, it wasn't that bad at all, most of the end user stuff was similar to *NIX and the developer section wasn't terribly taxing either.
BTW:
The copy construct is a higher-order construct that cannot be represented at the level of abstraction this API is operating at. The OP is really complaining that the API has an impedance mismatch with the level at which most programmers actually work.
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Smalltalk's creators didn't agree with you - I wonder if they do today.