Jos de Jong

A while ago I read the blog post Ranging Near and Far by Scott Sauyet. On Echo JS, Scott titled a link to this blog “Choosing simple APIs over flexible ones”. This title suggests that you have to choose between either simple or flexible APIs, which is a false dilemma. This got me thinking: What makes a good API? Flexibility Scott discusses the API of the range function of Ramda compared to that of Underscore. Where Underscores range supports optional start (defaulting to zero), custom step size, and a negative step, Ramda’s range “only” supports a step size of 1 and does not allow to omit the start value. While Underscores implementation is more flexible, Scott argues that Ramda’s more limited implementation may be the better choice because of its simplicity. Scott suggests that it is way more complicated to use Underscores range because of it being more flexible. Scott has an argument here, but there are more factors determining how easy it is to use an API.