Hacker News Reader

Comment by conroy | Hacker News Reader

In this case, a HTTP API is the abstraction. Integrating with ACH and other payment rails requires a lengthy integration process. Sometime you have to send binary files using FTP!

View on HN

The article says “no abstractions”, but HTTP is often exactly that: an abstraction over lower-level protocols.

I guess the phrase "no abstractions" is specifically valuable to us when designing our REST API resources - our whole stack is certainly an abstraction of sorts, but we don't want to add yet another abstraction in that specific layer.

Just wanted to say that I appreciated the article :) Using well-designed APIs is great, and seeing people putting a lot of thought on it, with the intent of improving dev experience, is very refreshing. I've dealt a lot of technically impressive Free Software projects that didn't focus on this as much, and as a result, using their libraries was harder.

Thank you!

perhaps what you're thinking of is "equal entropy abstractions" - HTTP is just a way of standardizing logic, but the complexity of the shape and behavior of the API remains.

My interpretation is that they meant domain-level abstractions. So, their API endpoints won't try to hide details about the underlying payment methods through abstractions, because that works best for those users.

The API being implemented with JSON over HTTP isn't related to the domain of processing payments, so I don't see it as a contradiction to the article's title.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com