I once had to do maintenance on a system that used an actual spreadsheet instead of APIs. It would load an excel file as a template, add data to certain cells and then save it as a new excel file.
Honestly, that’s what most web API’s are. You are just pushing data around. The “hard” part is that everyone has their own opinions on how it should be formatted.
And of course the minor inconvenience of having to give the user a way to make data entry easy, convenient and consistent.
But deep down it’s all spreadsheets. The faster you can wrap your head around that the easier programming is for you.
Lua figured that out back in '93, their main data structure is the table
but from a programmers perspective - shouldn’t it feel natural - you just keep filling up forms doing the same work again and again?
From a programmers perspective it takes a grand total of 2 minutes to do a bash/python script or jupyter notebook that exposes a semantically adequate interface. Maybe 5 minutes, if instead of just doing something quick and dirty yourself you decide to get into an argument with an LLM.
What do you mean by natural? Do you want stateful APIs?
Oh no.
I already hate apis that requires tokens. It’s awful to use manually
Why the fuck would you use an API manually?
In development. You may want to test the endpoint using curl or something like that
Scripts and aliases make this easy to set up.
Then what should they feel like? I don’t really know what you’re actually trying to say with the spreadsheet comment to begin with.
I have no idea what that means
Seems to be a dig at Postman
Edit: lol this is the same account/person that was advertising their shitty API tool I’m almost certain
oh cool. I’ve been looking for a postman alternative.
as long as it’s not slop I’ll check it out.
