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A comment on The Little Manual of API Design (2008) [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:The Little Manual of API Design (2008) [pdf] by jalfresi on Thursday June 18, 2015 @07:29AM (#9737879)
Iterative cycles take advantage of the regularity of change. APIs shouldn't change once public, hence the emphasis on Big Upfront Design. However, change still needs to happen so versioning comes into play.

Personally, when it comes to APIs, you can tell those that have been designed upfront rather than iteratively; they are generally better IMHO.

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Re:The Little Manual of API Design (2008) [pdf] by seanmcdirmid on Thursday June 18, 2015 @08:52AM (#9738201)
The API that appears to be well-designed up front was probably preceded by many not as great APIs either done by the same designers, or that could at least be learnt from. That is still quite iterative, just in the long term sense. Real waterfalls don't exist.

If you have an API that does something well known, find and learn from existing APIs that do that. If not, then he prepared for lots of trial and error, scenarios you didn't think of, and so on. It might make sense to put out a "worse is better" API first so the learning and feedback loops can start.

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