I work so much with APIs I began to gather a list of top APIs by experience and usability. Stripe is right up there at the top of the list, everything about it is just plain beautiful.

I literally paused reading when I read this simply put exact statement. I try to focus on minimal, simple apis and preach it to developers and clients for quick integration and maintenance. Now I have this powerful statement to save hours of explaining mainly to non technical people. I have always thought this but never so crisp and to the point. We need t-shirts. Doing a quick search of Google, it appears a few others have recently stated this as much but it is an idea that should take hold: http://www.kryogenix.org/code/apis-like/

Now we can only hope that 37Signals sees it

I 'got' this a few months a go, and it really does make you reassess what you work with and produce. It applies similarly to dev tools.

I think I figured that out when I went from NeXTSTEP to trying to use MFC.

I wound up using Delphi.