ASC 2020 - API Specifications Conference

“People judge you by the words you use” said an old commercial, and whether people are judging us or not, words are vital to communication. Words represent shared understanding, and words emerge from creativity, usage, and acceptance. The terms used in an API are no different, and often even well-organized companies find themselves with APIs that use widely varying terms for the same things. We’ve written tools for analyzing the vocabularies of APIs and have used them to examine large internal and external collections of API specifications. We’ll share patterns and clusters that we’ve found and tools that we’re using to power linters that learn and detect innovations that break or expand API conventions.