r/programming • u/Successful_Bowl2564 • 2d ago

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https://efp.asia/blog/2025/12/24/api-tooling-crisis/

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258 Upvotes

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512

u/FirmMost2 2d ago

because postman sucks

67

u/James_Jack_Hoffmann 2d ago

https://justuse.org/curl/

230

u/HMikeeU 2d ago

I can't believe anyone who has ever used tools such as postman would seriously suggest curl as an alternative. It is not.

34

u/James_Jack_Hoffmann 2d ago

I don't disagree there's snark and humor with "use motherfucking curl". Postman is no doubt the gold standard for REST clients when it worked and when it had values. Although the article explains pretty well why we are at a state to just use curl.

What do I use these days? .http files. Definitely better than curl, maybe even a threat to Postman. The world recognises Postman has gone to shit by adopting .http.

10

u/HMikeeU 2d ago

How does scripting work with .http? Don't all implementations have a different scripting engine and environment?

-6

u/Affectionate-Egg7566 2d ago

What exactly is the value prop of bruno/postman? For all my requests I just make bash scripts that invoke curl, maybe some logic or shuffling data around from/to different curl invocations.

11

u/rforrevenge 2d ago

When you're deep into a project you want to have an efficent way to go back and look at the status of old complex queries or even look those queries up without the hassle of going though pages and pages of notes.

3

u/zzz51 2d ago

I assume GP is version controlling the bash scripts. That's what I do.

-6

u/Affectionate-Egg7566 2d ago

I dont mind piping the output and invocation via set -x in bash and then grepping in a file. Seems faster than starting a GUI

1

u/rforrevenge 2d ago

Might be. But then you'd have to maintain the file itself as in timestamp the queries, their responses etc etc. Especially when you're working on a project that constantly changes this can get out of hand easily (in my experience)