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Oh very timely as I was just having this discussion with a friend recently. With this article and articles like it, the author has an implicit bias toward “les

Oh very timely as I was just having this discussion with a friend recently. With this article and articles like it, the author has an implicit bias toward “less is more” and “low level control is preferable”. Yes in the unrealistic case that you are a lone developer working on a very simple app that never evolves then yes, graphql is overly complex. In the more realistic case that you’re working with a team of developers on an app that grows over time, things like schemas and standards and types become very useful, if not necessary for maintainability. I’m not sure if there is a term for this (though the “no true Scotsman” cognitive bias comes to mind) but I do feel like there is a frustrating tendency for developers to tell other developers to cover the theoretical perfect thing over the practical great thing.

brightball 5y ago
Even then, after learning GraphQL I can’t imagine ever going back to REST with all the problems I know I’m bringing to the table.
bshipp 5y ago
The only term that immediately comes to mind is premature optimisation. Yes, there's an argument for minimizing the amount of redesign but I've found that by the time that's necessary I've discovered a dozen new ways of accomplishing the same task more efficiently anyway. the only time i start out a new project with high throughput tools like graphql or Hadoop, etc is for a hobby when my ultimate goal is to learn a new technology.
samhw 5y ago
Personally I think the mistake is to see it as a layer on top of HTTP, in any sense other than as a hack to make it work with web browsers (using POST /graphql as a poor man's plain old IP address or hostname). In conceptual terms, it's clearly an alternative to HTTP, so it's not a surprise that it collapses all of HTTP's expressive power into the singularity that is POST /graphql. It's interesting to imagine a web browser which truly did use GraphQL as a first-class query language comparable to SQL, with markup separated into another protocol altogether (HTTP GET, or an equivalent). I wonder what the future of web browsers looks like, and for how long we can continue simply by monkeypatching the HTTP resource model. Google's herculean efforts to adapt their crawler to the new de facto model, exemplified by SPAs, are interesting in what they reveal: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/34736.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

brightball 5y ago

Even then, after learning GraphQL I can’t imagine ever going back to REST with all the problems I know I’m bringing to the table.

bshipp 5y ago

The only term that immediately comes to mind is premature optimisation. Yes, there's an argument for minimizing the amount of redesign but I've found that by the time that's necessary I've discovered a dozen new ways of accomplishing the same task more efficiently anyway. the only time i start out a new project with high throughput tools like graphql or Hadoop, etc is for a hobby when my ultimate goal is to learn a new technology.

samhw 5y ago

Personally I think the mistake is to see it as a layer on top of HTTP, in any sense other than as a hack to make it work with web browsers (using POST /graphql as a poor man's plain old IP address or hostname). In conceptual terms, it's clearly an alternative to HTTP, so it's not a surprise that it collapses all of HTTP's expressive power into the singularity that is POST /graphql. It's interesting to imagine a web browser which truly did use GraphQL as a first-class query language comparable to SQL, with markup separated into another protocol altogether (HTTP GET, or an equivalent). I wonder what the future of web browsers looks like, and for how long we can continue simply by monkeypatching the HTTP resource model. Google's herculean efforts to adapt their crawler to the new de facto model, exemplified by SPAs, are interesting in what they reveal: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/34736.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...