Re: On the subject of complexity

On Aug 30, 2012, at 10:54 AM, Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com> wrote:

> What has not been properly recognized in the debate is the presence of
> a trade-off.  Building applications that have parts outside of your
> control sucks.  Sure, it's a natural consequence of trying to do
> anything more than the most trivial application.  That doesn't
> diminish its suckitude when it comes to writing and maintaining
> software. 

So I assume you would rather just run your code on bare metal and not have that irritating operating system in the way :-)

I just don't agree that I want an API to provide me complete control of everything that is possible - I want an API to abstract things and let me do what I need to do. Related to that, I will point out that getting all web sites to stop using a broken version of JQuerry has turned out to be pretty much impossible while getting a bug fixed in a browsers is just hard. 

Complexity in an API is about how hard it is to use and understand that API - come back with a really working example program that successfully negotiates video codecs while using devices with hardware support for H.264 on your API along with good ICE implementation and we can discuss which API is is more complex to use.

Received on Monday, 3 September 2012 16:36:25 UTC