  Modern software development requires a large investment in learning
application programming interfaces (APIs). Recent research found that the
learning materials themselves are often inadequate: developers struggle to find
answers beyond simple usage scenarios. Solving these problems requires a large
investment in tool and search engine development. To understand where further
investment would be most useful, we ran a study with 19 professional developers
to understand what a solution might look like, free of technical constraints.
In this paper, we report on design implications of tools for API learning,
grounded in the reality of the professional developers themselves. The
reoccurring themes in the participants' feedback were trustworthiness,
confidentiality, information overload and the need for code examples as
first-class documentation artifacts.
