You don't have to apologize, those aren't my opinions. I was summing up Google's motion, which has 6 parts. My particular focus is on API design too, and I kn

You don't have to apologize, those aren't my opinions. I was summing up Google's motion, which has 6 parts. My particular focus is on API design too, and I know the art that comes into it. But I would say that some APIs DO fall into this. Calling the equals method "equals" and having it take one argument and return a boolean is comparable to a "short phrase". There aren't many other ways to express the concept. When you start to look at a library or component as a whole though, it starts to take on a lot more value and uniqueness. You only have to start comparing mocking or assertion libraries in Java to realize that a huge portion of the differentiation between the libraries (and why people choose one over another) is the way it reads and its expressiveness, not its implementation details. And I think some teams at Google recognize this too, if you look at Guava and Guice.