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36 lines
1.5 KiB
36 lines
1.5 KiB
5 years ago
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title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Beware of Interface Changes"
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date = 2019-06-23
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "interfaces", "apis"]
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Interfaces and APIs is what you give away to others. If you keep changing them,
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you'll make everyone's life a sad life.
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<!-- more -->
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When talking about [boolean
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parameters](/books/things-i-learnt/boolean-parameters), I mentioned about
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renaming the function. If you control the whole source where the function is
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used, that's not issue, it's just a matter of search and replace.
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But if that function was actually exposed in a library, you shouldn't change
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function names in a whim. That will break a lot of other applications beyond
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your control and make a lot of other people unhappy.
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Remember, when you write [tests for APIs](/books/things-i-learnt/tests-apis),
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you can see these kind of changes happening and you can see the kind of
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changes you're doing on how they reflect externally.
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You can create the new functions and mark the current one as deprecated,
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either by documentation or by some code feature. Then, after a few released,
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you can finally kill the original function.
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(A dickish move you can do is to create the new functions, mark the current
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function as deprecated and _add a sleep at the start of the function_, in a
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way that people using the old function are forced to update.)
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{{ chapters(prev_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/boolean-parameters", prev_chapter_title="Don't Use Booleans As Parameters") }}
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