The term really is a bit too academic to understand for a lot of people who are unfamiliar with API design, but comes down to fairly simple concepts when explai

The term really is a bit too academic to understand for a lot of people who are unfamiliar with API design, but comes down to fairly simple concepts when explained in plain language. I compare it to how monads have an ivory tower definition (the famous 'A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors!') for mathematicians, but can be explained in practical terms much more helpfully, even if that loses some theory. Years ago I edited the Wikipedia page--it has always been thorny. The trouble is that the definition of REST is so abstract as to be completely meaningless to the average person reading the article. If you hate using your finite lifespan on something useful, read the talk page. You will find this same edit war playing out over 10+ years between the theorists ('a style of client-server stateless API design where resources undergo state transitions') and the realists who (mis-) define it as a HTTP api. Even though the theorists are correct, I think it's important to recognize that Wikipedia is going to be the first source of for literally millions of people. It would be a tragedy to not acknowledge that.