4 ms·
The descriptivist approach has a lot of merits when it comes to language -- to no small extent, words do mean what people think they mean; this is part of what
by wwweston 4y ago
The descriptivist approach has a lot of merits when it comes to language -- to no small extent, words do mean what people think they mean; this is part of what it means for words to have any meaning at all, and when entire cultures let the meaning of a word drift it's hard to figure out what ground to stand on in order to say they're wrong.
And yet... right or wrong, something substantial is lost when "literally" fades into a figurative intensifier.
Same goes for REST.
There's little immediate problem in the misappropriation of the term. The problem is how few engineers spend anything more than literally zero time actually thinking about the potential merits of the original idea (and quite possibly less). Not even talking about the people who spend time thinking about it and reject it (whatever points of contention I might raise on that front), just the sheer volume of devs who sleepwalk through API engagement or design unaware of the considerations. That's the casualty to be concerned about.
- xcambar 4y ago> And yet... right or wrong, something substantial is lost when "literally" fades into a figurative intensifier. Yes, but wisdom is to avoid to conflate "lost" for "degraded".
- marcosdumay 4y agoThis would be a better point if actual REST was something widely used. Then we would have lost a useful word. But personally, I think I have never seen any actual REST that wasn't just browser-oriented HTML. So using the word for the API pattern is quite ok.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoOn the other hand, there's nothing fundamental about html that is encoded in the REST acronym itself. Is an http JSON API representational? Yes. Does it transfer state? Yes. If anything the cruel bit is that we use JSON over HTTP, which is "supposed to be" for hypertext.