Writing an outline of a book is more analogous.

How about "table of contents"?

that would imply they plagiarized code...

Not sure if I agree. I find that coming up with good interfaces is often more of a creative challenge than the implementation. API's are worthy of some sort of protection since ease of use is a definite competitive advantage.

Also, you can easily screw your perf with bad interfaces (especially in C++). E.g., not templatizing, requiring extra allocations, type impedance mismatches, vtable bloat, etc. The interface certainly affects how the machine executes your code.

Are APIs/interfaces patentable?

Patents have been granted on claims that essentially cover an API. I think it would be harder to get such patents issued today than 10 years ago though.

Patents (20 year monopoly) would actually be less restrictive than copyrights (95 years)

Sounds like Windows 8 where the desktop was an "app" on the Start screen.

They can just change their name.

In a word where most new code is JavaScript, just use auto everywhere. It will be OK.

> If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure.

Seattle. Great water, renewable energy, lots of transit investment.

I love it when people use generic names and then add a two word comment describing what it is.

I also love it when people use primitives for time spans along with the units in the name or comment instead of TimeSpan/std::chrono.

My favorite is when people use a good variable name and then put a two line comment explaining what I could gather from the variable name.

You may be paying for it even if not using it, but you have to account for the environmental savings. But people care less about stuff that's harder to measure.

Agreed, they're all same-ish now.

Seems like a leaky abstraction. Did their interfaces have a way to account for differences in latency and failure modes, or was that hidden?