To be fair -- I am certainly not the only one that opened that page scared of seeing my own name. :-) >> It’s a great time in the history of computing to be wr

To be fair -- I am certainly not the only one that opened that page scared of seeing my own name. :-) >> It’s a great time in the history of computing to be writing an article about bad APIs (which is another way of saying it’s a terrible time to actually have to program for a living). It is hard to make good APIs. And for complex subjects it is probably impossible without iterating. But you would think the guys that did the 2nd generation of VMS were smarter and more experienced than me? But OK, there weren't much event driven programming in VMS, I assume. My vote for worst API I ever read: I remember reading the "Inside Macintosh" (pre Mac OS X) about simple file IO and it took me multiple readings to realize that you just set some of the parameters to get all the different functionality... (The rewrite of the Inside books were really good.)