API Driven

• Communicable results: the Timeless Stack describes processes in a Formula. Communicating a Formula – via email, gist, pastebin, whatever – should be enough for anyone to repeat your work.

API-driven design is important for many reasons:

• We need to be able to communicate our products and phases in our production chain;
• We want to be able to stop in the middle of a large sequence of processing and have easily serializable snapshots of what’s going on for debugging;
• We need those same snapshots for audit purposes in the future;
• and we want other tools and ecosystems to bind easily to our own – ideally, using nothing but some clear core APIs which are serializable using tools that are already readymade in any major programming language ecosystem.

We carry this principle at every layer. For example, Modules are meant to be a serializable construct: they can be reasoned about statically, and while they describe code, they themselves do not require any turing-complete operations to reason about; and they’re representable as simple, regular JSON. At a layer below, Formulas and RunRecords are the same: though they describe code, they’re static and can easily be analyzed without any need to execute them; and they’re simple, regular JSON.

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