And that article, having the same tone, would be about it being bad. But not understanding the conventions is not the same as being bad. A lot of this coding style is hard fought and battle tested.
A cumbersome API is a cumbersome API, regardless of why the developers thought it should be that way. Author understood conventions, I wager, but was treating it under the lens of "If I had to design this now, the sane way, where would the mismatch be?"
The only saving grace of a lot of the MS stuff is that the MSDN docs are usually pretty good--usually.
No question about it. My answer would actually be a lot more about the history of both Win32 and Win16, both of which I programmed in C++ for years. Looking at something like that now and proclaiming it bad is about the same thing as deploring the Mongol invasions.
