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Imagine saying something like: > I get exhausted by people talking about integers, floats, and strings and arguing about the "types" of different things. From

by ok_dad 5y ago

Imagine saying something like: > I get exhausted by people talking about integers, floats, and strings and arguing about the "types" of different things. From an implementation point of view, the difference between an integer, an float with or without a mantissa, or a string with numbers and decimal symbols is trivial. It has gotten to the point that... Things have meanings, and in computer science and programming those meanings can mean a performace difference or a difference in results, so I think it is very important that we start to pay attention to the "naval gazing" aspects of these things and not use a GET with a body, since there is a QUERY, and other specs which might be kinda naval-gazey. We are in a career that requires a pretty high level of strictness and we're always complaining about bugs in this or that software; then we argue that there is no meaning in certain things (only because in practice, people hadn't been strict about something like a GET request) which then leads to more bugs!

zestyping 5y ago
Thank you.
chrsig 5y ago
I think you may be misinterpreting my exhaustion -- I certainly agree that things have meaning. They have such a meaning that we standardize them. Thanks to the standardization and proliferation of the technology, there's generally an obvious correct choice, and a few poor arguments for others. In other words, it's generally not hard to make these things follow the Principle of Least Astonishment[0]. Every now and then there might be an interesting constraint that makes for a different choice (e.g., don't store zip code as an integer, because it may have a leading zero). The amount of verbose discussion that I observe any time rest semantics come up still baffles me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
jjav 5y ago
> Things have meanings Some things have fundamental meaning. Like integers, floats, and strings are clearly very different things. Whether you allow this or that via PUT vs. POST or whatever is just a convention, and one that you can freely change as long as it is fully documented.

by ok_dad 5y ago

zestyping 5y ago

Thank you.

chrsig 5y ago

I think you may be misinterpreting my exhaustion -- I certainly agree that things have meaning. They have such a meaning that we standardize them. Thanks to the standardization and proliferation of the technology, there's generally an obvious correct choice, and a few poor arguments for others. In other words, it's generally not hard to make these things follow the Principle of Least Astonishment[0]. Every now and then there might be an interesting constraint that makes for a different choice (e.g., don't store zip code as an integer, because it may have a leading zero). The amount of verbose discussion that I observe any time rest semantics come up still baffles me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

jjav 5y ago

> Things have meanings Some things have fundamental meaning. Like integers, floats, and strings are clearly very different things. Whether you allow this or that via PUT vs. POST or whatever is just a convention, and one that you can freely change as long as it is fully documented.