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I have to agree with this article. There is a tendency in tech to reinvent what we don't understand properly, and from experience of using third-party APIs (an

I have to agree with this article. There is a tendency in tech to reinvent what we don't understand properly, and from experience of using third-party APIs (and from my own ignorance too) - HTTP is the thing we seem to know the least about (well actually one could argue TCP/IP is ...) I read this article from top to bottom and I didn't feel the comments were extreme or purist. It did leave me thinking we need to spend more time learning and sharing knowledge of HTTP /REST than dismissing it. Of course, the headline is clickbait - and that is the only real criticism I had.

eropple 11y ago
We could assume that, yes, everybody, Facebook included, just doesn't know REST (and implicitly assume that REST is an inherent good in the process). Or one could go "you know, Facebook has a lot of insanely smart people and their engineers are on record as having had problems with REST around stuff like complex object graphs and cycles, so maybe their solution is worth looking at." If you have to say "oh, this thing is universally great, you all just don't understand it," I will bet hard against you at the first opportunity and I'll usually win in the process.
- neilellis 11y ago
  A large group of smart people often produce some really dumb ideas, like 'Google Wave' - so I wouldn't personally use 'Proof by Large Group of Smart People' in this case. Hacker News has been the home of many a bad idea by smart folk. Instead, maybe we should all be critiquing the points raised. In my limited experience, most engineers (yes including very smart ones) are more enamoured with their own ideas (and not discounting myself here!) than learning other people's work well. And the critique I read didn't seem unfair in that respect, more so it encouraged me to look deeper at HTTP first before I add something into my apps own protocols. Which to me is a good thing. Especially around content negotiation which I had not looked at beyond a superficial understanding. For the record I ain't no purist :-)
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Right, but if your argument is that they just didn't understand REST, and yet they employ some of the smartest people around, so if they can't understand REST, what chance do the rest of us have?

eropple 11y ago

We could assume that, yes, everybody, Facebook included, just doesn't know REST (and implicitly assume that REST is an inherent good in the process). Or one could go "you know, Facebook has a lot of insanely smart people and their engineers are on record as having had problems with REST around stuff like complex object graphs and cycles, so maybe their solution is worth looking at." If you have to say "oh, this thing is universally great, you all just don't understand it," I will bet hard against you at the first opportunity and I'll usually win in the process.

neilellis 11y ago
A large group of smart people often produce some really dumb ideas, like 'Google Wave' - so I wouldn't personally use 'Proof by Large Group of Smart People' in this case. Hacker News has been the home of many a bad idea by smart folk. Instead, maybe we should all be critiquing the points raised. In my limited experience, most engineers (yes including very smart ones) are more enamoured with their own ideas (and not discounting myself here!) than learning other people's work well. And the critique I read didn't seem unfair in that respect, more so it encouraged me to look deeper at HTTP first before I add something into my apps own protocols. Which to me is a good thing. Especially around content negotiation which I had not looked at beyond a superficial understanding. For the record I ain't no purist :-)
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Right, but if your argument is that they just didn't understand REST, and yet they employ some of the smartest people around, so if they can't understand REST, what chance do the rest of us have?