Such distinctions have been discussed to death over the past 10-15 years, but the most obvious benefit is to allow developers to know something about an API wit

Such distinctions have been discussed to death over the past 10-15 years, but the most obvious benefit is to allow developers to know something about an API without having used it before: PUT, DELETE, and GET to resources are all idempotent operations that act on an entire resource. A PUT to a collection acts on the entire collection. On the other hand a POST to a collection creates a new resource in that collection. You can know all of those things and more about a RESTful web service without reading a line of documentation. So I would personally consider the distinctions between HTTP verbs very useful and quite underutilized. The UNIX filesystem is another example where distinctions between seemingly arbitrary terms helps a user know more about a system without knowing details about a specific implementation: /home is for user data, /etc for configuration, /var can probably be mounted non-executable, /usr/local mirrors /usr, etc. Despite a wide range of variation amongst implementations, someone familiar with these distinctions can navigate fairly comfortably on a wide range of operating systems and distributions. On the other hand, let's pretend my patch is worthless. I would hope that doesn't lessen the usefulness of my post. My attempt was not to enforce some pedantic standards compliance but rather introduce developers to how to diagnose problems and come to solutions.