Surely "1337" is the same as 1337, right?

bleistift2@sopuli.xyz to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 524 points –

Meme transcription:

Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?

Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”

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"Hey, it appears to be int most of the time except that one time it has letters."

throws keyboard in trash

Rust has perfectly fine tools to deal with such issues, namely enums. Of course that cascades through every bit of related code and is a major pain.

Sadly it doesn't fix the bad documentation problem. I often don't care that a field is special and either give a string or number. This is fine.

What is not fine, and which should sentence you to eternal punishment, is to not clearly document it.

Don't you love when you publish a crate, have tested it on thousands of returned objects, only for the first issue be "field is sometimes null/other type?". You really start questioning everything about the API, and sometimes you'd rather parse it as serde::Value and call it a day.

API is sitting there cackling like a mad scientist in a lightning storm.