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Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
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Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#2boardcast of localhost
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#3Facebook, far and above anything else.
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?
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#4Not me personally but this got some traction twice on HN: https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0029.html
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#5Jira's can be very unwieldy. It is a hard one to google answers for and the Python interface is practically undocumented. It's seems to be often out-performed by the site itself.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#6Ive been using sports API's for side projects this year and found google-fit api the worst. The problem is that it was conceptually different, based on a timeline, and lower level while the other API's were based on individual sessions
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#7I can't count them!!!
but the best one is telegram bot API: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#8Hmmm... Anything enteprisey. I once had to interop with Viacess-Orca RiGHTv IPTV/DRM clusterfuck, and wouldn't recommend anyone to get remotely close. Not just to that, but to anything SOAP.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#9RETS, (Real Estate Transaction Standard) without a doubt. Its an ancient xml protocol that is still important today but really painful to work with!
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#10The old Microsoft Crypto API (the newer one is better, but still bad)
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 :-)