This talk will address the mess that is human relationships (marriage, children, friendship), computer relationships (public APIs, poorly documented code, GUIs) and draw depressing comparisons that prove that all of life is just interacting with poorly documented APIs.

This is as a result of God issuing the following memo:

• All people will henceforth expose their opinions and attitudes through words and expressions.
• People must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
• There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via language processing (often poorly) with words via friends.
• It doesn’t matter what technology they use. English, French, Chinese, Swahili, HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom runes — doesn’t matter.
• All words and expressions, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, people must plan and design to be able to expose the language to people who are outside of their personal sphere of influence No exceptions.
• Anyone who doesn’t do this will be shown a painful fire-laden death.
• Thank you; have a nice day!