> The philosopher in me doesn't mean to be snarky, but what the author concedes here is that APIs actually aren't like user interfaces. I'd say that the 'prope

> The philosopher in me doesn't mean to be snarky, but what the author concedes here is that APIs actually aren't like user interfaces. I'd say that the 'proper' API design depends very much on the language you target, at least when you come to details. However there are a few overarching principles of UI design which also hold for API design such as consistency (in my view the most important part of UI design) or discoverability. In my view resorting to documentation is a second line of defense. The first line being able to understand intuitively. This is one reason I prefer libraries over frameworks. The latter almost always require documentation for working with them (you need to implement these 5 interfaces and put them into this factory,...). The former done right are almost always intuitively understandable.