I suppose I should have been more clear. That’s my twitter account. I was reacting to the idea in the original link of making protobuf easier to use by introducing more or better tooling.

Whether you like that or not depends a great deal on the kinds of APIs you want to create and the ways in which you want them to be used. Nowadays where we tend to use something-over-HTTP for many APIs, whether service to service, or human to service, there’s going to lots of differences in requirements, contexts, and opinions.

From _one_ of those many contexts, the purpose of having an HTTP API is not so client A can do _expected_ things with service B. It is so any _human_ can do _unexpected_ or unplanned things with service B, with any client, including no client.

In that context, the human comprehensibility, visibility, consistency, and grammar of the API are (to me) the most important considerations both for the persons developing the API and those using it. Introducing layers of tooling and other abstractions can make it harder for the developer to be aware of when they are introducing what amount to grammatical errors. Those errors then make the use of the API confusing or incoherent.

Of course if the API being created is solely service to service and it is desirable to enforce that, then the grammar concerns become different. There you want the computers (only) to know the grammar and IDL and things like it can be good tools for enforcement and automation.

My complaint, and the reason I’m not looking forward to it, is that I’m oriented towards having more APIs be available for unexpected uses and casual exploration. When things are comprehensible by easy inspection that’s more possible for more people. Being able to look at a related list of URLs and associated JSON and relatively quickly getting an overall understanding of what’s going on is analogous to being able to view source on the web. In both cases you are looking at, or very close to, the actual thing and that’s something I think is worth keeping, where possible.