> On average the older APIs are much nicer to work with
IMO this is because they are better written, by people who had deeper understanding of the entire OS picture and cared more about writing performant and maintainable code.
Well-illustrated in the article “How Microsoft Lost the API War”[0]:
The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box).
The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve.
The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work.
The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with.
> making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve.
I feel the same way about Spring development for Java.
IMO this is because they are better written, by people who had deeper understanding of the entire OS picture and cared more about writing performant and maintainable code.