[jerf]

That just leads to bigger fools. I don't just mean that as clever wordplay, but as a serious point. No matter how sloppy you make your API someone else will use it even more sloppily. Now you've got an enormous sloppy surface you can't properly contain or maintain, and people still transgress its boundaries even so.

The robustness principle has its times and places but the general consensus that it should be applied everywhere to everything was a big mistake. The default should be that you are very rigid and precise and only apply the robustness principle in those times and places it applies, and I'm perfectly comfortable waiting to deploy something precise and find out that this was one of them. The vast majority of APIs is not the time and place for the robustness principle. It's the time and place for careful precision on exactly what is provided, and detailed and description error messages, logging, and metrics for when the boundaries are transgressed.