A Really Bad Idea -- Adding Clutter to A Language

A DBA suggested that I read up on "Practical API Design: Confessions of a Java Framework Architect".

Apparently the DBA had read the phrase "direct compiler support of versioning of APIs" in a review of the book and -- immediately -- become terribly confused.

I can see why a DBA would be confused. From a DBA's point of view all data, all processing and all management-- all of it -- is intimately tied to a single tool. The idea behind Big Relational is to conflate configuration management, quality assurance, programming and the persistent data so that the product is inescapable.

[The idea is so pervasive that not using the RDBMS has to be called a "movement", as in "NoSQL Movement". It's not a new idea -- it's old wine in new bottles -- but Big Relational has become so pervasive that avoiding the database makes some folks feel like renegades.]

Adding to the confusion is the reality that DBA's live in a world where version management is difficult. What is an API version number when applied to the database? Can a table have a version? Can a schema have a version?

[IMO, the answer is yes, database designs -- metadata -- can easily be versioned. There's no support in the database product. But it's easy to do with simple naming conventions.]

For a DBA -- who's mind-set is often twisted into "one product hegemony" and "versioning is hard" -- the phrase "direct compiler support of versioning of APIs" maps to "direct tool/database/everything support of versioning." Nirvana.

All Things in Moderation

A relevant quote from the book is much more sensible than this fragment of a review. "Some parts of the solution should be in the compiler, or at least reflected in the sources, and processed by some annotation processor later."

API versioning is not a good idea for adding to a programming language. At all. It's entirely a management discipline. There's no sensible avenue for "language" support of versioning. It can make sense to carry version information in the source, via annotations or comments. But to augment a language to support management can't work out well in the long run.

Why not?

Rule 1. Programming Languages are Turing Complete. And Nothing More. Syntactic sugar is okay, if it can be proven to be built on the Turing complete core language. Extra "features" like version control are well outside the minimal set of features required to be Turing complete. So far outside that they make a completeness proof hard because there's this extra stuff that doesn't matter to the proof.

Therefore: Don't Add Features. The language is the language. Add features via a toolset or a annotation processor or somewhere else. Your API revision junk will only make the proof of completeness that much more complex; and the proof won't touch the "features".

Rule 2. Today's Management Practice is Only A Fad. Version numbering for API's with a string of Major.Minor.Release.Patch is simply a trendy fad. No one seems to have a consistent understanding of what those numbers mean. Further, some tools (like subversion) simply using monotonically increasing numbers -- no dots.

Someday, someone will come up with an XML Feature Summary (XFS) for describing features and aspects of the the API, and numbers will be dropped as uselessly vague and replaced with a complex namespace of features and feature enumeration and a URI referencing an RDF that identifies the feature set. Numbers will be replaced with URI's.

Therefore: Don't Canonize Today's Management Practice in the Language. When the current practice has faded from memory, we don't want to have to retool our programming languages.

What To Do?

What we do for API version control is -- well -- hard work. Annotations are good. A tool that scrapes out the annotations to create a "profile" of the API might be handy.

In Python (and other dynamic languages) it's a much simpler problem than it is in static languages like Java and C++. Indeed, API version management may be one of the reasons for the slow shift from static to dynamic languages.

If we try to fold in complex language features for API version support, we introduce bugs and problems. Then -- when management practice drifts to a new way of handling API's -- we're stuck with bad language features. We can't simply deprecate them, we have to find a new language that has similar syntax, but lacks the old-bad API management features.

Distutils

Python distutils has a nice "Requires", "Provides" and "Obsoletes" specification that's part of the installation script. This is a handy level of automation: the unit of configuration management (the module) is identified at a high level using simple numbers. More than this is probably ill-advised.

And -- of course -- this isn't part of the Python language. It's just a tool.