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?"

Comments

Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[eldavojohn]

As a developer who deals daily with RESTful interfaces at his job, I found this to be rather intuitive. It may be complicated but would you be so kind as to elaborate on what is unnecessarily complicated about this interface? You might think "Oh, you're just moving data around" but add on top of that security like SSL support, scalability, namespaces and the ability to store very large hundred GB objects then ... Yeah, the end result is going to be a bit more than PUT <Data>Object</Data>. It's well documented as far as I can tell. I haven't used it so I don't know if this documentation is worthless but it looks comprehensive at first glance.

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.

Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

Slashdot is so non-technical these days it's a complete fucking joke. Ignorance just spews on anything even remotely related to software development. Please drop "news from nerds" from the slogan. Replace with "lip service for sycophants".

Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[mondoterrifico]

Coding is hard! Let's go shopping!

Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[sribe]

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.

Heck, I had the exact same reaction to this article, and I haven't even looked at the API! My reaction was based solely on the wording theodp's atrocious post.

Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[mcgrew]

It isn't slashdot that has become non-nerdy, it's that being a nerd has become "cool", very unlike it was when slashdot started. These days, anybody who knows that you make your computer stop by clicking "start" thinks (s)he's a nerd, even if they couldn't copy a file without a GUI, let alone have ever heard of Linux or BSD or any other non-Microsoft OS (which these days actually have GUIs).

In the old days, a submission like this most likely wouldn't have been posted, but now we have the firehose, where every nerd wannabe can vote a story up. There are still very good, technical stories here (there was one a couple of days ago about mathematics) -- you just have to ignore the ones like this one voted up by the wannabes. That said, I haven't looked at Google's APIs.

God, I never thought I'd see the day when we would be considered cool! Just laugh smugly and enjoy being cool instead of being a wannabe.

That said, sometimes I say stupid things here (probably a lot this week, I've had the flu and it's affected my mental faculties).

Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[fusiongyro]

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."

Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[Lunix Nutcase]

Perhaps the OP would enjoy a line of work that involves shovels and dirt.

Yeah, but shovels are too complicated an unintuitive. I mean it would probably take theodp hours to figure out which end he is supposed to hold and which end goes into the dirt.

Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[Yvan256]

To the shopmobile!

Re:Hint: "For Developers" Means "For Developers"

[masmullin]

What? Shopping is way more difficult than coding!

If everyone was supposed to understand it...

[Low Ranked Craig]

They wouldn't call it code.

Re:If everyone was supposed to understand it...

[Sockatume]

The da Vinci Code begs to differ.

Re:If everyone was supposed to understand it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The da Vinci Code begs to differ.

I still don't understand why anyone would want to read it. Does that count?

It's just not for regular users

[kikito]

In other news: the space shuttle UI is too complicated for regular car drivers! duh.

Yes

[Dunbal]

Whatever happened to simple interfaces, like:

"Would you like to play Global Thermonuclear War? [YES|NO]"

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

We didn't have a Google story for over two hours, so we had to post what was available.

Re:Simple Interface from Google?

[Low Ranked Craig]

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.

Meanwhile, slashdot editors too dumb for own good

[jaymz2k4]

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

It isn't their design

[igb]

As the documents point out, it's the same API used for Amazon EC3 and others. They're implementing someone else's protocol.

Re:It isn't their design

[SashaMan]

Mod parent up. This is from the docs:

Interoperability
Google Storage is interoperable with a large number of cloud storage tools and libraries that work with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.

Basiacally, google is essentially building on what has become an industry standard for cloud storage.

This article submission is either from an idiot or a troll.

Are you one of those types

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ob. Quote

[gzipped_tar]

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

Re:Rule of the 5 Year Old and 7 Year Old

[sammy baby]

anything that is user facing should be able to be explained to a common 5 year old (hint if you have enough developers available then you should have access to at least one).

As the parent to your post noted: we are talking about an API here. Precisely none of it is user facing.

Re:API is not a UI

[wurp]

Do you think anyone who would conflate API with UI will know what conflate means?

Article Tag

[codepunk]

The tag on the article "submittertoostupid" pretty much says it all here folks.

Nice low-level API. Missing high-level API.

[Millennium]

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.