ProgrammerHumor
curlWrappers
Discussion
Yeah, the same way as programming languages are wrappers for machine code, to a less extreme degree perhaps
I'm still astonished by the fact that Postman Labs raised capital at $5.6B valuation. There's just no way it's real, it will never have corresponding revenue and none of the tech giants will buy them because they would just make the similar product themselves
I still can't believe that shit is paid software. It feels deceptively simpler compared to some industrial scale FOSS projects I know.
There's nothing wrong with commercial software but their pricing is pretty crazy - the highest tier cost as much as IntelliJ IDEA which is much more advanced and useful product. Same with amount of investment they received
Never underestimate the power of stupid people who need a GUI for everything.
I'll never forget when I wrote a solution for the exact problem someone was having, with a beautiful CLI that could handle all usage elegantly, and then later discovered they weren't using it because the CLI was "too confusing" and they just wanted "a webpage that you can do everything from."
Shows your miniscule experience with software development. Yeah sure, manually add 5 attachments and a bearer token, + the content type header and 5 query parameters, I am sure it it will work great
Write a shell script and pass those as parameters or store different ones that you use regularly in configuration files.
I do it every single day, and it's absolutely trivial.
EDIT: Wow, you've copied and pasted the same response eight different times now. I'd ask if you're defending GUIs so fervently because you're a frontend developer, but frontend developers are more creative than that.
or maybe just use a GUI? its about making life simpler, not harder hahah
You only have to write the script once. Hell, you could ask an AI to do it for you.
or maybe, just maybe, use the GUI?
Don't make this your entire personality
do u use arch btw? write out scripts for everything?
Nothing that a script around curl could not do
lol look at that user's comment history. Suspiciously keen on defending Postman®
Jesus, he wrote the exact same thing eight times. I think we made the sensitive little baby frontend developer mad.
Seriously man, this is not hard. I’m 35 years into my career. Scripts are better. They share more easily, infinitely customizable, and can be put into your cicd pipeline without any fuss or additional dependencies. Just because it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
Yeh, why make any application at all...
I'm 3 years into my career and don't understand how you're getting downvoted and the GUI defender is getting upvoted. Even script kiddies know script > UI. What's below a script kiddie? Vibe coders?
We have been infuriated my friend.
I know enough companies that just pay for the license. The cost of developing it yourself, including all the testing stuff etc., is higher for most companies than just subscribing to Postman.
On the other hand, I also know a lot of companies (including the one I work in) where we are weeding out Postman and replacing it with Bruno.
I'm talking specifically about exit for investors, and one of the possibilities is that Amazon or Google or Microsoft just buys Postman to integrate it into their cloud offerings but that seems unlikely
It's a decent product, I just don't think its price and valuation are justified. Two large companies I'm familiar with made their own API registries tailored to their needs and didn't even thought about using off-the-shelf product
Speaking of cUrl, their project is being inundated with AI slop contributions
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/
I read it as CRUD for some reason and nodded. RIP
They don’t necessarily rely on curl
For all intents snd purposes, you can consider libcurl a standard implementation of networking protocols. Relying on it instead of making your own implementation is a basic common sense.
Though I can't say its API is convenient. Thus, wrappers.
I only use netcat.
I don't know about that. I've been on very few commercial projects that would rather implement libcurl over a simple RPC over HTTP request, and many socket libraries in all languages are much lighter weight.
If you're just making something small, then sure. But you should avoid using it in commercial software unless you want to go through an add the curl license to all your projects.