Christopher Scaffidi wrote this ACM Crossroads article in 2006 about the usability of APIs. He presents four challenges of API design and presents various strategies to overcome these. The challenges are: 1) inadequate documentation, 2) insufficient orthogonality, 3) inappropriate abstractions, 4) incomplete assumptions. In summary, he states that three themes occur when designing a good API: make the problem smaller, use an approach that is only fast on average, and find an approximate solution.
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