REST's big win, as a commenter said, is caching. I think of REST-style as the read-only calls in any program being hashed to their results (e.g. "mult(5,2)" ->

REST's big win, as a commenter said, is caching. I think of REST-style as the read-only calls in any program being hashed to their results (e.g. "mult(5,2)" -> "10"), and used as a cache. If those parameter values are frequent, this can be a huge win. But if always unique, no win at all (minus the hash.put() and hash.get() overhead). Probably obvious to folks here, but I now realize REST is FP, in its immutableness... The human readability of REST is very nice (as another commenter said), but that's the specific realization of REST in HTTP - not a necessary to REST-style.