Guidelines For Designing Clean Interface

Question

When I read articles on software development, I often heard of the phrase "clean interface". People talked about clean interface for APIs, and classes.

How do you define "clean interface"? Is there any guideline for designing a system with clean interface?

Answer 1

Whole books have been written on this, and Framework Design Guidelines (.NET-centric) is one of my favorites. There's a lot to it, and no simple answer, but if I were pressed for a simple answer, I'd say design an API so that the simple stuff can be done without the dev having to read any extended documentation. That implies a straightforward, consistent interface with sensible, descriptive names. Don't make it hard to do the basic stuff.