"API is forever. If you expose too much up-front then it increases the surface area of getting things wrong, which developers will be stuck with for a long time or need to deal with eventual deprecations which is fun for no one. Also, more API leads to higher complexity in learning. It is better to see how your API is being used and slowly reveal more functionality as you become confident it is what developers need."
This is so, so true. If you find yourself thinking about exposing something because someone might have a use case for it or to provide greater control over some very specific corner case, write it down, file it somewhere, and revisit that when you see how people are actually using your API. Don't mistake all the ways your API could be used for all the ways people want to use it.
This is so, so true. If you find yourself thinking about exposing something because someone might have a use case for it or to provide greater control over some very specific corner case, write it down, file it somewhere, and revisit that when you see how people are actually using your API. Don't mistake all the ways your API could be used for all the ways people want to use it.