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by kuschku 3284 days ago
> There are no official client libraries, no minimal examples, different banks only support certain versions etc. etc. etc.

Sounds just like any other API, from most REST APIs to messengers.

HBCI is a lot better designed, and a lot easier to work with than the many different messengers that exist on phones nowadays. Everything is documented, everything is specified, and you have a stable API. Try getting something like this for Facebook Messenger, Allo, Duo, WhatsApp, Signal, Riot, all at once.

HBCI is bad, but it's a rare gem. Usually, when many major corporations have similar products, they try to prevent any such APIs from being created at all.

> non-machine-readable

I'm not sure I've seen any major API that's machine readable. Most major APIs don't have any machine-readable specifications publicly available. They probably have them internally, but almost never publicly.

> german-language-only

That's not really an issue, if you're in Germany. I don't go into the US and expect their banks to provide their specifications in English either. I realize that English has become the lingua franca in IT, but that's not a good thing.

1 comments

What do you mean English being the lingua franca is not a good thing? Do you mean it's bad, or it just is what it is? I think there's benefit to having a universal language, but it doesn't have to be English...
A lingua franca's ideal should be to be easy to learn, able to express lots of things. English is easy to start with, but hard to master, and its expressiveness isn't ideal either, often having to import words from other languages where english has no word for a concept itself.
I'm betting on a symbolic referential language as becoming the defacto standard for programming binary machines. From my cursory glance at Mandarin, I see a lot of similarities with expressing code.