Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?

It's unreliable, unstable, poorly documented, and yet every manager wants to use it because hey Facebook are a big company their Api must be great right?

Not exactly the best way to control a network device. But it is what we have.

Plus, every machine tries to do something different with the non-standard stuff. And different parts of the APIs (called MIBs) from the same vendor follow different reference conventions, so you end up asking a lot of (mostly useless) data to be able to change something from up to down.

Avoid it if you can and use something simpler, like sshing to the device.

Then, maybe, PayPal's NVP APIs. Quite a mess (although, I guess, I can understand why it's that way), with docs not really covering the fine details, esp. all the possible failures.

It's been a few years, but from memory:

IIRC you could e.g. install new keys, but not quite list them (somehow only almost), and you couldn't remove them again.

Amusingly you could also tell the API was developed by three different people, who preferred different API styles (I remember one was fond of callbacks, the others apparently not so much). Reading the documentation was pretty funny because you got pretty good at spotting which functions had been created by Alice, Bob or Charlie. That was the only thing that was fun about it :-)

http://reaxml.realestate.com.au/docs/reaxml1-xml-format.html

Its an xml format for uploading property listings. Came with a dtd but was hard to really fathom out which combinations are valid.

Didn't know it could take so much code for polling simple data for IDs.

    FOO=ABCDEFG|BAR=QWERTYUIOP

WinAPI: Because of compatibility some old API procedures with ugly designs have to remain, for example CallWndProc. Bonus: WinAPI is Pascal calling convention based (__stdcall vs __cdecl).

Unity Engine: Because pascal case sucks (I consider CamelCase for C# master race).

Webpack/Gulp: again the same clause of WebRTC but ‘parenthesized’/‘bracketized’