> APIs have been around for a while. For instance, the painful Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) used APIs in the early 2000s, but they really started getting interesting when representational state transfer (REST) came along. REST, which used the ubiquitous HTTP protocol, was lightweight and fun to work with.
Umm, yes, there were no APIs before the 2000s. Even ignoring non-web APIs there were plenty of pre-SOAP attempts at APIs on the web. XML-RPC was created in 1998 and is the direct predecessor to SOAP.
It feels like the author of this post has no historical perspective on the technology he is trying to explain, and if he skipped all the "What is an API" preamble that would be fine, but with it there it feels like an attempt at sounding like an authority that backfired.
I tried to see who this "Jesse Menning" is, but the author link goes to a twitter page for "Jeremy Menning" that hasn't seen use in 10 years. I'm not sure I should really put much trust in a blog post by an author that doesn't even know his own Twitter handle.