Agree, the author doesn't paint the picture of what might be coming. Would love to hear from the HN crowd on what's coming next in API design. I see a lot of buzz around grpc, will this be the next standard?
- optimise the amount of data you send (see graphql/this persons agent idea)
- optimise where you send it to/from
The latter has a hard limit of c, which we’ll always try to move towards. Distributed computation helps, but trades off speed/consistency. The question then becomes whether you can have an inconsistent model for those few seconds.
You invite the problem of eventual vs strong consistency, split brain issues, etc. There's a reason that the two hard problems in computing are naming things, cache coherency, and off by 1 errors.
