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No More Spreadsheet APIs (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 31 points 7 months ago (9 children)

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.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Spreadsheets are a UI view of tabular structured data with terrible kludges to fake hashes, with no real support for tree structures and heterogenous data structure hierarchies. And if the API you're using is complex, namespaced XML because vendors, UI tends to obscure more than help.

    Postman and the like are expensive intermediate abstractions between you and the underlying calls that I find a hindrance. For end users, forms can help, but even then you have to choose between something so generalized to effectively be a DSL like the old XForms spec or else build separate bespoke forms for each use case.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 7 months ago (6 children)

    but from a programmers perspective - shouldn't it feel natural - you just keep filling up forms doing the same work again and again?

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    What do you mean by natural? Do you want stateful APIs?

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Oh no.

    I already hate apis that requires tokens. It's awful to use manually

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Why the fuck would you use an API manually?

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    • [–] 17 points 7 months ago

    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.

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    [–] 12 points 7 months ago

    just use curl

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    [–] 16 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I have no idea what that means

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    • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    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.

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