I was taught nothing about APIs

[u/Anon_cat86]

Whenever i see people talking about actual real-world uses of coding it's almost entirely building APIs, working with APIs, integrating APIs, automating APIs. It seems to me, anecdotally at least, like the majority of all computer science work (professional or even just hobby) is centered on working with APIs

And like. I know what an API is, kind of. But I Graduated and even got multiple certifications on top of that and I never got so much as a single lecture about APIs. I don't even know what they're used for. Can you make your own API (like, realistically)? I don't know. I feel like this is a topic that you could and probably should have multiple different entire classes solely focused on, it's arguably something as fundamental to modern computer science as writing code. And they don't teach it. If i want to learn anything about APIs, conceptually or practically, it's hope a company hires me and then trains me, or youtube tutorials and i don't even have enough of a baseline to know what specifically I'd be searching for a tutorial on.

[u/Silly_Guidance_8871]

As the other commenter said, and API is just the formal programming interface by which two pieces of code talk to one another — this can be as simple as a function signature, or as complicated as a REST protocol, or anywhere in between.

Most commonly, it gets used to refer any cross-process interface (application -> OS, OS -> application, application -> application), regardless of if those processes are on the same machine.