[tclancy]

I get it but a lot of the war stories from Raymond Chen's blog https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ were about helping major corporations unscrew something that had relied on a private Windows API because there hadn't been a good way to do it. I would guess most cases of people choosing to rely on a private method are laziness or lack of knowledge about "the right way" (or call it bad documentation), but not 100%.

[igregoryca]

Discovering and using private APIs is not a walk in the park. I doubt "laziness" is a common motivation for doing so. Lack of knowledge or bad docs, perhaps. But there's often no officially sanctioned way to do something that people want (and perhaps will pay for) - most private API usage I've seen falls into this third bucket.

[pdpi]

Laziness comes in many forms. Arguably, discovering and using private APIs is a form of intellectual laziness — it requires you to refuse acknowledging that the whole system is telling not to do things that way.

[onli]

If you defer to authority. That is, you accept that the people who made the API have the authority to dictate you what you can or can't do on your hardware (or for other people on their), that privating the parts of the API you need was a conscious decision (and not just laziness on their part) and that in general you listen to commands like that.

Even with just a shroud of hacker thinking that is not something programmers should easily accept.

[tclancy]

Oh wow, that is the opposite of Hacker Mentality to me. I may question lots of other people, but if some other coder put in the time to construct a well designed API that includes public and private methods, my first thought is never “I know better”. Took me a couple of decades to stop thinking that though, so what do I know?