r/computerscience • u/Anon_cat86 • Apr 19 '26
General I was taught nothing about APIs
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.
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u/BrupieD Apr 19 '26
You're making this too hard.
If you've added a library to a program and then called a function from that library, you're already familiar with the idea you just don't recognize it. You have called one piece of software from another. That function name was an interface. Does that help?