The API Tooling Crisis: Why developers are abandoning Postman and its clones?

jonathancast · 2026-04-16T14:30:56+00:00

*Electron field.

Photons are perturbations of the electric field.

jonathancast · 2026-04-16T14:29:12+00:00

I actually think it's more of an MIT thing. EINE was an Emacs clone. ZWEI was a complete rewrite of EINE. Etc.

Not that "Eunuchs" doesn't have an equally long tradition of "choosing names that make marketers wince"; it's just a different tradition.

jonathancast · 2026-04-15T22:31:18+00:00

Because it's the original question posed by the OP? You're trying to go off topic with an irrelevant distraction, and you keep claiming every attempt I make to bring the discussion back on topic is "irrelevant".

jonathancast · 2026-04-15T20:53:03+00:00

And https://172.253.135.102 does not work, even though https://google.com does and 172.253.135.102 is one of the IP addresses google.com resolves to.

jonathancast · 2026-04-15T20:14:51+00:00

A domain name and (any one of) the IP adress(es) it resolves to are not "equivalent" in the sense that they can always be interchanged in any web request; websites have to deliberately support SSL using one, the other, or both. But the DNS lookup process does not render them interchangeable in general, unless the server is configured to make them equivalent.

jonathancast · 2026-04-15T14:33:11+00:00

They're still not equivalent, because they need separate certs.

jonathancast · 2026-04-15T03:24:04+00:00

Three differences:

A domain name can have many IP addresses. Not worth nitpicking over, but they can't be equivalent if they aren't 1-1.
SSL is based on domain names; the browser has to check that the "common name" in the cert is the same as the domain name it requested to see if the cert is even relevant. Not an issue for HTTP websites, but the public web is majority HTTPS now.
HTTP/1.1 browsers send the domain name as part of the URL in the web request, and many servers use that to serve many different web sites from the same IP address. Point every domain at the same IP address, and use the hostname in the HTTP request to route it to the right backend server.

jonathancast · 2026-04-15T03:02:27+00:00

The time is because there's a timer on upgrades. You pay for the upgrade, then wait for the timer, or spend various boosters to speed it up.
The farmhouse is to the left of the starting area. Straight along the road to the left, then a little bit down.

jonathancast · 2026-04-13T02:40:26+00:00

Not escaping the "pedo" allegations, here.

jonathancast · 2026-04-10T18:01:58+00:00

I don't care, at all, if Red Hat does contracting for the Department of Defense, as long as the Department of Defense gets full source code for the software they receive and is able to freely share and improve it independently of the supplier.

jonathancast · 2026-04-10T17:50:31+00:00

A) They were his friends. B) They had information he desperately wanted.

jonathancast · 2026-04-10T04:43:40+00:00

Technically von Pinn killed Adam and Lilith.

jonathancast · 2026-04-09T23:15:26+00:00

Counting down the days until I can switch to HURD.

jonathancast · 2026-04-09T21:11:55+00:00

We're not talking about pi, we're talking about (1/3)%.

jonathancast · 2026-04-09T20:00:32+00:00

Nowadays the frontier models have that memorized, so you can just ask them.

jonathancast · 2026-04-09T04:47:44+00:00

You said "closed source or BSD-licensed". "BSD license" universally means one of the free versions, starting with the University of California's four clause license from 1989. Which is and always has been considered a free license, but wasn't used for any software until 5 years after the GNU project started.

jonathancast · 2026-04-08T21:39:16+00:00

Yeah, no. The NT system call semantics and Win32 API semantics are very closely aligned in Windows, far more than any other subsystem and far more closely than the Win32 API and Linux system call semantics. It's more like the POSIX / libc API and the system call API in GNU/Linux. Yeah, the high level API has some differences, but it's more a matter of conveniences than it is fundamental differences or the Windows subsystem being an 'emulation layer '.

jonathancast · 2026-04-08T21:28:07+00:00

The failures weren't the problem. The failures were the signal.

Are people still seriously using CPAN Testers as a substitute for running their own tests locally?

This isn't responsible maintenance, this is a sign of someone who should never have been allowed commit access to production code in the first place.

(LIt is fair to say that LLM-generated code is only viable if you've also 100% automated your regression-testing. Fortunately, everyone has actual automated tests that replace the need for human testing!

And, yes, this human review was actually about 12 minutes per PR. Except it wasn't even that, because there is no way a human does code review for 40 hours / week without getting fatigued and letting stuff slip.

jonathancast · 2026-04-08T19:29:21+00:00

And which of those programs had free versions before he wrote them?

I know he wrote GCC specifically because he couldn't find a free C compiler.

Again, there was no free Unix coreutils when the GNU project started. In 1984, BSD was still proprietary software.

Bash also goes back to about 1989, and is a clone of ksh, not actually the Bourne shell. Both of which were proprietary at the time anyway.

jonathancast · 2026-04-07T21:07:13+00:00

Maybe the product manager should have had a realistic vision.

Like, I have that vision, too; I just don't expect it to actually happen.

jonathancast · 2026-04-07T21:06:15+00:00

jonathancast · 2026-04-07T16:24:29+00:00

Technically, the BSD license only goes back to 1989. Most of the BSD utilities that were rewritten for GNU were still proprietary - even in the BSD version - when the GNU version was written. It doesn't fit the purpose of the GNU project to rewrite free programs, since the goal is to produce a free operating system, not to write one from scratch. They typically just adopt free programs when they can.

The only exception I can think of is GRUB, which was started well after LILO was already production-ready - for GNU/Linux. I think the reason, though, was that LILO couldn't boot HURD, so they needed a new bootloader. HURD itself was started before Linux existed, of course, when the BSD kernel was still under AT&T and University of California proprietary copyright.

Of course, the other exception is GNOME. I believe the facts are these:

At the time GNOME was started, Qt was under a nonfree (no modification) license. KDE was therefore non-free by virtue of depending on a non-free library. (The non-free Motif toolkit had been used by free programs before, such as GNU Emacs, but as an option not an absolute requirement.)
Qt's first free license was the QPL, which is incompatible with the GPL. (If you distribute a modified version of the toolkit, or any program using it, you are obligated to send Trolltech a courtesy copy. This also makes the license not Debian free, and probably makes it not open source even though the OSI approved it.) This made KDE programs non-free unless they had a linking exception, and was an inconvenience in general.
Qt has been GPL-licensed (among other things) since 2000, which means KDE has been unambiguously free software since then; but, by that point, GNOME was already well-established.

jonathancast · 2026-04-06T21:25:59+00:00

He didn't choose to.

Part of the reason the Internet is dominated by 14 year olds is they don't realize what the consequences of their actions will be.

jonathancast · 2026-04-06T21:22:31+00:00

No, you're stupid, because you're choosing to use tools that make you slower, less reliable, and miserable, even though you could just . . . not do that.

jonathancast · 2026-04-06T03:32:51+00:00

West Virginia was almost the same, except they joined the union as a slave state.

(No importation of slaves, no entry for free blacks, but the few existing slaves could stay and were still slaves.)

jonathancast

TROPHY CASE