
What is an API? How does it work? - robertakarobin
https://www.venturelessons.com/what-is-an-api-and-how-does-it-work/
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nineteen999
I don't know, this seems incredibly web-centric, apart from a brief comment
that "Microsoft Word uses your computer’s storage API to find files".

"The term API seems to appear for the first time in the article of Ira W.
Cotton, Data structures and techniques for remote computer graphics, published
in 1968. " \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface)

Looong before the advent of web programming. I'd expect a more in depth
discussion of API's to at least mention lower level API's like WinAPI, POSIX
etc, and how higher level API's are usually created to wrap, or to aggregate
existing API's.

After all, the vast majority of SOAP and XML-RPC API's are leveraging those
lower level API's to begin with.

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robertakarobin
You're absolutely right. This article is geared toward people who are brand-
new to programming, and in turn is geared toward people learning about
programming through web development.

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mogadsheu
As some one who’s learning to code in my spare time, this is fantastic.

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hprotagonist
Use of the term 'API' appears to be this decade's 'algorithm'.

It's just an agreed on set of rules about how we're going to exchange data
(aka, compute something).

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sebazzz
I like the word contract for this. Especially because you ought to break
things when you change the contract. Maintaining backwards compatibility is
quite fascinating, think how Windows for instance manages version
compatibility with using "struct size" parameters for instance and app
manifests.

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hprotagonist
I usually map Interface to contract. But i grew up on c#, so that probably
makes sense.

