The DOI matches its Crossref record.
What Makes APIs Hard to Learn? Answers from Developers
Abstract
The paper discusses the application program interface (API). Most software projects reuse components exposed through APIs. In fact, current-day software development technologies are becoming inseparable from the large APIs they provide. An API is the interface to implemented functionality that developers can access to perform various tasks. APIs support code reuse, provide high-level abstractions that facilitate programming tasks, and help unify the programming experience. A study of obstacles that professional Microsoft developers faced when learning to use APIs uncovered challenges and resulting implications for API users and designers. The article focuses on the obstacles to learning an API. Although learnability is only one dimension of usability, there's a clear relationship between the two, in that difficult-to-use APIs are likely to be difficult to learn as well. Many API usability studies focus on situations where developers are learning to use an API. The author concludes that as APIs keep growing larger, developers will need to learn a proportionally smaller fraction of the whole. In such situations, the way to foster more efficient API learning experiences is to include more sophisticated means for developers to identify the information and the resources they need-even for well-designed and documented APIs.
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Cited by
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Using an LLM to Help With Code Understanding
Nam, D., Macvean, A., Hellendoorn, V., Vasilescu, B., & Myers, B. (2024) · Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3597503.3639187 · Cited by 487
Software Documentation Issues Unveiled
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Self-citationExploring exploratory programming
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Khan, J. Y., & Uddin, G. (2022) · Proceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3551349.3559548 · Cited by 96
Application Programming Interface Documentation: What Do Software Developers Want?
Meng, M., Steinhardt, S., & Schubert, A. (2018) · Journal of Technical Writing and Communication · doi:10.1177/0047281617721853 · Cited by 78
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Understanding How Programmers Can Use Annotations on Documentation
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Enabling Data-Driven API Design with Community Usage Data: A Need-Finding Study
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A Theory of Robust API Knowledge
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The Long Tail: Understanding the Discoverability of API Functionality
Horvath, A., Myers, B., Grover, S., Dong, S., Zhou, E., Voichick, F., Kery, M. B., Shinju, S., Nam, D., & Nagy, M. (2019) · 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) · doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818681 · Cited by 9
When Retrieval Augmentation Meets API Documentation: Can LLMs Code with Less-Common Libraries?
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Metadata
- Authors
- Robillard, M. P.
- Venue
- IEEE Software
- Published
- 2009-11
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 27-34
- ISSN
- 0740-7459 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2008107570
- Cited by
- 382
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 43.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
