Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

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I’m saying as a consumer of these libraries, I don’t want joiners, I want lots of different APIs that make different trade-offs for each use case, and I will write (or use) adapters if I need to (that’s my responsibility as a consumer).

Just because I personally either do or do not get some value out of a shared API standard doesn’t mean you do or do not, so personal feelings of what one likes need to be set aside, so the service boundary is at the level of consumers choosing their own adapters and making their own trade-offs.

If lots of libraries sign up, we all lose. Much slower compliance-constrained development cycles, less freedom for libraries to break the shared API contract in ways many users would be super happy to abide for the sake of a faster / better feature. Instead of making these trade-offs library by library, case by case, it’s made for you with standardization compliance as the highest constraint, regardless of the user base for which that does / doesn’t work well.

This strikes me as a bit pessimistic. I think you are mostly against _bad_ standards than standards per se.

If the consortium does its job well it will produce a good standard that all the major libraries like: from a UX as well as a performance viewpoint.

If it produces a bad standard, all that will happen is that nobody will sign up. No libraries are going to be _forced_ to do anything.

That’s fair except I’d say even good standards can cause a big slowdown in feature releases, and not everyone values the adherence to the standard as much as the features. It still seems better to just spin out the standard into a set of optional adapters and let library maintainers and users pick their own trade-offs in terms of when to adopt breaking changes, how / whether to smooth over idiosyncrasies across multiple libraries.

Even a good standard has costs and this particular case does not seem like it has good arguments in favor of a wide standard, but many arguments against it.

No, it's easy for library maintainers to offer a compat API in addition to however else they feel they need to differentiate and optimize the interfaces for array operations. People can contribute such APIs directly to libraries once instead of creating many conditionals in every library-utilizing project or requiring yet another dependency on an adapter / facade package that's not kept in sync with the libraries it abstracts.

If a library chooses to implement a spec compatability API, they do that once (optimally, as compared with somebody's hackish adapter facade which has very little comprehension of each library's internals) and everyone else's code doesn't need to have conditionals.

Each of L libraries implements a compat API: O(L)

Each of U library utilizers implements conditionals for every N places arrays are utilized: O(U x N_)

Each of U library utilizers uses the common denominator compat API: O(U)

L < U < (L + U) < (U x N_)

Where the APIs are compatible anyway, but only the names or order of arguments are different, it sure would be nice to have a standard so you didn't have to look up whether it was count or len or length or size.

Disagree. Those are the super easy cases for me to create my own adapter that does that for me in a way that works for my use case, leaving others free to do it / ignore it at their own discretion, depending on their use cases.

Maybe one person creates various functional wrappers around the array structures to make composition of length or count work in their functional programming design. Someone else created mixins and their own derived classes that solve it with OOP designs, etc etc. Someone else only uses Jax and doesn’t care. Someone else uses infinite streams on top of these and so they never need length or count.

Forcing the same call semantics on all these users doesn’t make sense. Let them build their own abstractions if they need to standardize semantics for their use cases.

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