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%.

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igregoryca 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.