4 ms·

I disagree. To me this term is a meaningful way to express the values of a project. It means that the abstractions will be at the highest level possible to prov

I disagree. To me this term is a meaningful way to express the values of a project. It means that the abstractions will be at the highest level possible to provide the result. Whenever the library can make a decision for you, it will attempt to do so. It is like you are dealing with a human intelligence that is always guessing what you want and trying to give it to you. When I see "for humans", I expect that the api will behave like a human. This is not always desirable. Sometimes the highest level of abstraction is the wrong level of abstraction. Sometimes you need to be making all those decisions yourself, and you don't want the library to ever guess what your intention is. The human-like apis tend to work wonderfully until you need to optimize, have security concerns, or figure out you're actually doing something novel. Then you jump down a layer of abstraction and everything fits wonderfully again. Sometimes you really are just dealing with a machine and telling the machine what to do and whatever humanity is brought to the task is simply a distraction.

kstrauser 7y ago
You say you disagree, but then go on to spell out my position quite nicely. "For humans" implies a certain level of abstraction that quite often tends to be too abstract in exactly the way you describe. "We don't bother you with all the little details that the others make you handle!" frequently ignores the fact that those others make you specify all that stuff for a reason. For example: "Do you want this database to be AP or CP?" "Don't pester me with the nitty gritty! I just want to store data." A "for humans" database that quietly made the choice for you would be very bad news if it later turns out to have chosen poorly for your own workload. The first "for humans" thing I saw was Python's Requests library, and I think it earned the title. Having just built a web scraper on top of raw httplib a year earlier, I would have killed to have had Requests available. It's a great example of a project with a decent track record of mostly setting good defaults and letting devs concentrate on their parts of their projects. Since then, I have seen very few "for humans" projects that weren't so abstract as to become almost unusable. I mean, you could call MS Paint "Photoshop for humans", but that doesn't make it so.
- acrisci 7y ago
  Oh ok I thought you were making the point that "for humans" is a sort of meaningless marketing term, but I see you understand the nuances of this. Sometimes it is good to be "for humans" but you are saying most people in your experience who make the attempt fail. The classic example I think is Microsoft Access (databases for humans) which is great until it can't do the one thing you need and then it doesn't work anymore. And everyone needs a different one thing.
  - kstrauser 7y ago
    Ah, got it! I think that's a great example.

kstrauser 7y ago

You say you disagree, but then go on to spell out my position quite nicely. "For humans" implies a certain level of abstraction that quite often tends to be too abstract in exactly the way you describe. "We don't bother you with all the little details that the others make you handle!" frequently ignores the fact that those others make you specify all that stuff for a reason. For example: "Do you want this database to be AP or CP?" "Don't pester me with the nitty gritty! I just want to store data." A "for humans" database that quietly made the choice for you would be very bad news if it later turns out to have chosen poorly for your own workload. The first "for humans" thing I saw was Python's Requests library, and I think it earned the title. Having just built a web scraper on top of raw httplib a year earlier, I would have killed to have had Requests available. It's a great example of a project with a decent track record of mostly setting good defaults and letting devs concentrate on their parts of their projects. Since then, I have seen very few "for humans" projects that weren't so abstract as to become almost unusable. I mean, you could call MS Paint "Photoshop for humans", but that doesn't make it so.

acrisci 7y ago
Oh ok I thought you were making the point that "for humans" is a sort of meaningless marketing term, but I see you understand the nuances of this. Sometimes it is good to be "for humans" but you are saying most people in your experience who make the attempt fail. The classic example I think is Microsoft Access (databases for humans) which is great until it can't do the one thing you need and then it doesn't work anymore. And everyone needs a different one thing.
- kstrauser 7y ago
  Ah, got it! I think that's a great example.