I’m genuinely curious as to what an abstraction-rich api would look like and why it would be useful.
I’ve mainly worked in enterprise organisations or in startups transitioning into enterprise which is sort of where my expertise lies. I’ve never seen an API that wasn’t similar to the examples in this case.
I mean… I have… but they wouldn’t be labelled as high-abstraction api’s. If they needed a label it would be terrible APIs. Like sending table headers, column types in another full length array with a line for each column, and then the actual data/content in a third array. Even sending the html style that was used in what ever frontend, so that some data is represented as “some data” and other is represented as [“some data”, [“text-aligned”, “center”…],… . Yes, that is an actual example. Anyway I’ve never seen a high abstraction api and I feel like I’m missing out.
Compare GTK/Qt to raw xlib/wayland/win32/cocoa primitives - including the way that those toolkits abstract away the differences.
Or (as others have pointed out) the various `git` "porcelain" commands (checkout/add/commit/branch) compared to the primitive operations for dealing with various object types. Even just `git pull` as a combination of `git fetch` and `git merge`.
Or how a filesystem API of open/read/write/close/unlink is a very simple abstraction over block allocation and (in the old days) moving a disk head and waiting for the platter to spin under it in order to access the right sector. Not to mention the "directory" and "subdirectory" abstraction, instead of just having one giant table of inode numbers.
Edit: Or compare HTML with abstractions like "headings" and "paragraphs" to a raw typesetting language like troff or TeX.
I’ve mainly worked in enterprise organisations or in startups transitioning into enterprise which is sort of where my expertise lies. I’ve never seen an API that wasn’t similar to the examples in this case.
I mean… I have… but they wouldn’t be labelled as high-abstraction api’s. If they needed a label it would be terrible APIs. Like sending table headers, column types in another full length array with a line for each column, and then the actual data/content in a third array. Even sending the html style that was used in what ever frontend, so that some data is represented as “some data” and other is represented as [“some data”, [“text-aligned”, “center”…],… . Yes, that is an actual example. Anyway I’ve never seen a high abstraction api and I feel like I’m missing out.