this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
281 points (94.9% liked)
Programmer Humor
18971 readers
612 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No there isn't.
Tell me how you partially change an object.
Object User :
{ Name: whatever, age: 0}
Tell me how you change the name without knowing the age. You fundamentally cannot, meaning that you either have to shuttle useless information back and forth constantly so that you can always patch the whole object, or you have to create a useless and unscalable number of endpoints, one for every possible field change.
As others have roundly pointed out, it is asinine to generally assume that undefined and null are the same thing, and no, it flat out it is not possible to design around that, because at a fundamental level those are different statements.
As I already said, it's very simple with JSON Patch:
Good practice in API design is to permissively accept either undefined or null to represent optionality with same semantics (except when using JSON Merge Patch, but JSON Patch linked above should be preferred anyway).
I.e. waste a ton of bandwidth sending a ridiculous amount of useless data in every request, all because your backend engineers don't know how to program for shit.
Gotcha.
It's about making APIs more flexible, permissive, and harder to misuse by clients. It's a user-centric approach to API design. It's not done to make it easier on backend. If anything, it can take extra effort by backend developers.
But you'd clearly prefer vitriol to civil discourse and have no interest in actually learning anything, so I think my time would be better spent elsewhere.