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

bleistift2@sopuli.xyz to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 558 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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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.