How to Break an API: How Community Values Influence Practices
summary
Interviews and a survey of 18 ecosystems show that values drive practices and tradeoffs: Eclipse enforces synchronized yearly releases and strict backward compatibility so packages from a decade ago still run but recruiting and innovation slow; CRAN enforces snapshot consistency with volunteer review and simultaneous releases so breaking changes require coordination; npm embraces semantic versioning and multiple coinstalled versions plus tooling like Greenkeeper so rapid change and many dependencies thrive but require constant maintenance.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Community values in APIs
- 3:49API breaking changes matter
- 7:16Eclipse Java vs NodeJS
- 12:32Eclipse stability tradeoffs
- 15:32R snapshot consistency
- 17:49NodeJS rapid innovation
- 22:06Cultural tradeoffs in design
- 23:39Designing software communities
- 24:46API breaking research
- 25:07Q&A
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