Standards or lack thereof

[dragoness_e]

The more I work with ad-hoc APIs, the more I appreciate formal, written standards. Means code doesn't break because some dev suddenly decides it would be more aesthetic to re-arrange the order of parameters in an API call in the newest version. With a standard: forty-year-old C code will compile and run just fine as long as it follows one of the international standards the compiler recognizes. Without a standard: yesterday's Minecraft mods may be broken because some dev decided to re-arrange the terrain generation code overnight.

I have encountered both situations. There's a lot of open-source devs out there that don't seem to understand that an API (Application Programming Interface) is supposed to be a STABLE interface to back-end code; you can re-arrange the back-end code to suit, but the interface (API) is supposed to remain the same.