Hacker News Reader

Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

API contracts are not free, and for things that were not decided to be an API and or a contract an absolute waste of time.

Of course I’m “breaking all contracts at once”, for most of them were never a contract to begin with, and the monorepo effectively discourages people from assuming random behaviors are in fact contracts, and that preserves my sanity and the sanity of the code base that now doesn’t suffer from the combinatorial explosion in complexity that happens when people want everything to be an API contract.

View on HN

> API contracts are not free

Yes, they are. They are as free as adding a new endpoint.

> and for things that were not decided to be an API and or a contract an absolute waste of time.

You're talking about integrating multiple projects. There are always contract. You simply chose to be ignorant of that fact and fail to interpret breaking those contracts as the root cause of all your problems.

You point out anyone lauding monorepos as some kind of solution to any problem and I assure you that we can immediately isolate one or more problems caused by versioning and breaking contracts.

The only reason why we see this nonsense paraded in web services is that they are loosely coupled. When people worked mainly with modules and libraries, compiler and linking errors made this sort of error very obvious. Now people chose to unlearn facts and want to call that operational improvements.

> There are always contract. You simply chose to be ignorant of that fact and fail to interpret breaking those contracts as the root cause of all your problems.

This reminds me a lot of the dynamic vs. static typing discussion. Even at a function level, there's always a contract, no other option. The only decision you can make is whether it should be well documented, compiler verifiable and explicit, or not.

I've found referring to them as implicit vs explicit contracts conveys the idea and is more well received than proclaiming someone's ignorance.

People (especially product managers) want to forget that there should be a spec somewhere and there’s a cost associated to the changes because you’re breaking contracts (updating relations between entities) and modifying execution flows (rewriting use cases). If you are making a monorepo, you should also have a single document specifying the whole project because of the tight coupling between services.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com