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REST is one of the worst tech religions ever created yielding the most blinkered zealots. It's treated like a Bible where every word is taken as the Gospel trut

REST is one of the worst tech religions ever created yielding the most blinkered zealots. It's treated like a Bible where every word is taken as the Gospel truth that can't be tested, validated, compared or improved upon. Any alternative technology that reduces latency, improves performance and end user experience is considered an evil intrusion invalidating the purity of REST and must be vanquished. In the name of REST, practitioners give themselves a free-ticket to develop large, over-architected, dumb chatty high-latency solutions at the expense of the end user as long as tech choices are made within their interpretation of REST. Normally technology serves the client, unless you're a REST zealot in which case what the needs of the client is secondary, its more important to obtain Internet kudos points by forcing your way up the maturity ladder. No we must develop and shoe-horn all App and User experiences within the constraints of an ambiguous thesis that was built to link and update documents and create server-driven turn-by-turn apps. The fact they can't correctly interpret what different parts of REST means amongst themselves have generated programmer-decades worth of wasted discussions in the most useless bikeshed ever.

steinnes 11y ago
Well said. My blood boils thinking back to all the times I've heard "Yeah, but that's not REST." as a response to a perfectly reasonable and sane idea/suggestion.
AdieuToLogic 11y ago
REST is one of the worst tech religions ever created yielding the most blinkered zealots... Any alternative technology ... is considered an evil intrusion invalidating the purity of REST and must be vanquished. What a reasoned, sound, rational discourse. Good thing zealotry should be shat upon. No we must develop and shoe-horn all App and User experiences within the constraints of an ambiguous thesis that was built to link and update documents and create server-driven turn-by-turn apps. Wow. Pretty harsh, considering that the author of said "ambiguous thesis" is also one of the handful of people responsible for defining the very infrastructure which makes your diatribe possible to disseminate. Along with some guys named Tim[1] and Henrik[2]. Perhaps, instead of using this "shoe-horn-mandatin', ambiguous thesis thinkin', can't-force-their-ideas-on-everyone" HTTP "religion", you'd prefer whatever Facebook tells you is better? Oh, and ya might want to do that with something that doesn't use HTTP. Coz if you did, then u r p0wned by teh man. 1 - http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ 2 - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt
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- devtique 11y ago
  > Wow. Pretty harsh, considering that the author of said "ambiguous thesis" is also one of the handful of people responsible for defining the very infrastructure which makes your diatribe possible to disseminate. Actually no, TCP/IP/DNS is the backbone of the Internet and what made the Internet possible, HTTP was invented before Roy dropped his thesis. People like to give Roy kudos for inventing the Internet which re-inforces the "Bible" concept REST-afarins like to re-enforce as their blindly ignoring any other superior technology that's not deeply rooted in a REST philosophy. Here's a quote from Alan Kay on the Internet as it was invented in 1969 - which handle billions of nodes that has never been stopped after it was turned on and had all its atoms replaced: > The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? Take note the lack of any mention of REST. This is what he has to say about the tacked on "Web" you're attributing to the Internet: > The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. The thing that makes the Internet possible is its infrastructure, the thing that makes the web platform powerful is modern web browsers - i.e. the things that only the largest tech companies spending decades of developer effort and investing 100's of millions can do to maintain a competitive browser. Which Despite its primary focus and decade-long head-start it's still getting eaten by Native Mobile Apps and not because they better at adhering to the constraints of REST, quite contraire, they're not grounded into the turn-by-turn per-request model and just focus on providing the best end-user experience they can using the most suitable technology for each task. HTTP is a conduit sitting in the middle, adding unnecessary overhead on each request that's great for linking documents and composing static content sites but is poorly optimized for Responsive or Interactive Web Apps. > you'd prefer whatever Facebook tells you is better? No people should learn to think for themselves and use their experience to pick the best tool for the job, not blindly follow mindless preachers who can only think in REST ignoring anything superior that can deliver end-users a better experience - i.e. who Technology should be serving, not the other way round.
dang 11y ago
This subthread started out inflammatory and turned, predictably, into a ridiculous flamewar. Please don't do that here. We detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413927 and marked it off-topic.

steinnes 11y ago

Well said. My blood boils thinking back to all the times I've heard "Yeah, but that's not REST." as a response to a perfectly reasonable and sane idea/suggestion.

AdieuToLogic 11y ago

REST is one of the worst tech religions ever created yielding the most blinkered zealots... Any alternative technology ... is considered an evil intrusion invalidating the purity of REST and must be vanquished. What a reasoned, sound, rational discourse. Good thing zealotry should be shat upon. No we must develop and shoe-horn all App and User experiences within the constraints of an ambiguous thesis that was built to link and update documents and create server-driven turn-by-turn apps. Wow. Pretty harsh, considering that the author of said "ambiguous thesis" is also one of the handful of people responsible for defining the very infrastructure which makes your diatribe possible to disseminate. Along with some guys named Tim[1] and Henrik[2]. Perhaps, instead of using this "shoe-horn-mandatin', ambiguous thesis thinkin', can't-force-their-ideas-on-everyone" HTTP "religion", you'd prefer whatever Facebook tells you is better? Oh, and ya might want to do that with something that doesn't use HTTP. Coz if you did, then u r p0wned by teh man. 1 - http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ 2 - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt

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devtique 11y ago
> Wow. Pretty harsh, considering that the author of said "ambiguous thesis" is also one of the handful of people responsible for defining the very infrastructure which makes your diatribe possible to disseminate. Actually no, TCP/IP/DNS is the backbone of the Internet and what made the Internet possible, HTTP was invented before Roy dropped his thesis. People like to give Roy kudos for inventing the Internet which re-inforces the "Bible" concept REST-afarins like to re-enforce as their blindly ignoring any other superior technology that's not deeply rooted in a REST philosophy. Here's a quote from Alan Kay on the Internet as it was invented in 1969 - which handle billions of nodes that has never been stopped after it was turned on and had all its atoms replaced: > The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? Take note the lack of any mention of REST. This is what he has to say about the tacked on "Web" you're attributing to the Internet: > The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. The thing that makes the Internet possible is its infrastructure, the thing that makes the web platform powerful is modern web browsers - i.e. the things that only the largest tech companies spending decades of developer effort and investing 100's of millions can do to maintain a competitive browser. Which Despite its primary focus and decade-long head-start it's still getting eaten by Native Mobile Apps and not because they better at adhering to the constraints of REST, quite contraire, they're not grounded into the turn-by-turn per-request model and just focus on providing the best end-user experience they can using the most suitable technology for each task. HTTP is a conduit sitting in the middle, adding unnecessary overhead on each request that's great for linking documents and composing static content sites but is poorly optimized for Responsive or Interactive Web Apps. > you'd prefer whatever Facebook tells you is better? No people should learn to think for themselves and use their experience to pick the best tool for the job, not blindly follow mindless preachers who can only think in REST ignoring anything superior that can deliver end-users a better experience - i.e. who Technology should be serving, not the other way round.

dang 11y ago

This subthread started out inflammatory and turned, predictably, into a ridiculous flamewar. Please don't do that here. We detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413927 and marked it off-topic.