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> everyone knows that the Unix APIs are often seen as elegant while the Windows APIs are seen as ugly I think people consider the UNIX CLIs ("do one thing and
by mehrdadn 6y ago
> everyone knows that the Unix APIs are often seen as elegant while the Windows APIs are seen as ugly
I think people consider the UNIX CLIs ("do one thing and do it well") to be elegant, not UNIX APIs. UNIX APIs have quite massive (and well-known) warts in them.
- tsimionescu 6y agoSure, there is a lot of nuance - for example, the Unix CLI is very much seen as a kind of API, and appreciated mostly for API-level decisions (pipe-able commands, everything is a file, everything is text), not necessarily so much for CLI-level features (such as variable handling, looping etc.). Also, some Unix OS APIs are much preferred over Windows alternatives - e.g. many people think fork()/exec() is much more elegant than CreateProcess(), same for pthreads vs the Windows threading model etc. The bottom line though is that people have opinions about API design, it is clearly seen as a creative process, it is not rote technicality.