Post #1509024

2026-04-07 10:00 UTC

Honestly, that’s what most web API’s are. You are just pushing data around. The “hard” part is that everyone has their own opinions on how it should be formatted. And of course the minor inconvenience of having to give the user a way to make data entry easy, convenient and consistent. But deep down it’s all spreadsheets. The faster you can wrap your head around that the easier programming is for you.

Replies (3)

@DataElemental@programming.dev 2026-04-22 02:26

Spreadsheets are a UI view of tabular structured data with terrible kludges to fake hashes, with no real support for tree structures and heterogenous data structure hierarchies. And if the API you’re using is complex, namespaced XML because vendors, UI tends to obscure more than help. Postman and the like are expensive intermediate abstractions between you and the underlying calls that I find a hindrance. For end users, forms can help, but even then you have to choose between something so generalized to effectively be a DSL like the old XForms spec or else build separate bespoke forms for each use case.

Open ##1509023
@ICastFist@programming.dev 2026-04-08 11:42

Lua figured that out back in '93, their main data structure is the table

Open ##2139144
@dhruv3006@lemmy.world 2026-04-07 10:10

but from a programmers perspective - shouldn't it feel natural - you just keep filling up forms doing the same work again and again?

Open ##2139145