4 ms·

How I Explained REST to My Wife

35 points by aba_sababa 15y ago

rabble 15y ago
Gosh, i explained REST to my wife by explaining that it's just HTTP and then sending her a link to Roy Fielding's doctoral dissertation. So frustrating to assume that women can't be perfectly competent hackers in their own right.
- kstenerud 15y ago
  Yes, I can see how it would be so much more approachable to throw dense text consisting of the following at someone: "In parallel with the software engineering research in architectural styles, the object-oriented programming community has been exploring the use of design patterns and pattern languages to describe recurring abstractions in object-based software development. A design pattern is defined as an important and recurring system construct. A pattern language is a system of patterns organized in a structure that guides the patterns' application [70]. Both concepts are based on the writings of Alexander et al. [3, 4] with regard to building architecture." That's so much simpler than "We need to be able to talk to all machines about all the stuff that’s on all the other machines. So we need some way of having one machine tell another machine about a resource that might be on yet another machine." Your wife may have understood it, but Ryan's wife lacked the CS background.
- acangiano 15y ago
  In fairness, he didn't call it, "How to explain REST to your wife" or "How to explain REST to your grandma". He is talking about his own wife, which happens to be ignorant about computer science. There is no assumption on his part.
  - dextorious 15y ago
    Most women are ignorant about computer science. It's a fact, not an assumption. If you want the hard numbers check the number of ungraduates/graduates in CS/IT, for males and females. I'm saying that women are not capable of grasping IT (hell, the very first programmer was a woman, mrs. Lovelace). I'm saying that in actual, real life, they statistically don't want/care/attempt to. Maybe they are just smarter and go where the big money are these days (biology), as well as the better hours.
    - PotatoEngineer 15y ago
      Most men are ignorant of computer science, too. You're right in one aspect: of the very, very few people in the world who know about computer science, most (more than half, anyway) of them are men.
- bradly 15y ago
  His point is how he explained REST to someone with out a technical background. It just so happened that that person was his wife. If it was his dad instead, would there be any issue? https://gist.github.com/1525252 https://gist.github.com/1525252
- jordan0day 15y ago
  Somewhat glib question, but, if your wife didn't already know about REST, how did she fare with the dissertation? Is that what she really wanted? Was her response "Thanks for not treating me like a child?" or more "I don't really have time to read a doctoral dissertation. Can't you just give me the executive summary?" I mean, my wife is smarter than me and has a doctorate and a lot of letters after her name, but she's never cared to learn too much about how the drivetrain in a car works. If she asked a simple question like "How does a car's transmission work?", I highly doubt she'd be happy if I just linked her some pdf's covering the physics and mechanical engineering of CVT's and said, "you're welcome!"
  - kstenerud 15y ago
    Relevant: http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/youre_welcome_college_students.png http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/youre_welcome_college_studen...
deleted 15y ago
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tfb 15y ago
This might help: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife&hl=en&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS401US418&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
kenjackson 15y ago
Wife: How does it work? Ryan: The web? Wife: Yeah. Ryan: Hmm. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason. Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser? Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff you type in there is one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing. Ryan went down a completely different path than I would have. I don't think most people who ask how the web works care about the http protocol. At least I wouldn't, if I didn't know better. I think I'd be more interested in how the network infrastructure is laid out and how requests get from my computer to a server and the data back and rendered. http is really just an implementation detail (people did this far before http existed).
- gitah 15y ago
  Well what you're talking about is the Internet and the TCP/IP stack. The World Wide Web is an application that runs on the Internet. To describe the Internet when someone asks how the web works would be like describing how the iOS works when someone is curious about a specific app.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Well no. Part of the web is the internet. You can't skip the internet and talk about resource representation caching in REST. But I am talking about the web -- that's why I mentioned how pages are rendered. HTTP and HTML, while both are fundamental to the web, are also just implementation details. HTTP has evolved a fair bit since its inception for the web (there was no PUT or POST, for example). To take your analogy, it would be like describing Cocoa library when your wife asks how an app works.
strags 15y ago
Wow... His "wife" seems to know exactly what questions to ask, and how to respond in precisely the correct manner as to move the conversation along: "Sounds like GET is a pretty important verb."
Vaanir 15y ago
That's oddly creepy, I was reading this last week after Googling "REST". Even though it's quite vague, even I learn one or two things, quite an interesting read! Something to share on Tweetbook I guess.
llambda 15y ago
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763570 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763570

35 points by aba_sababa 15y ago

Gosh, i explained REST to my wife by explaining that it's just HTTP and then sending her a link to Roy Fielding's doctoral dissertation. So frustrating to assume that women can't be perfectly competent hackers in their own right.

kstenerud 15y ago
Yes, I can see how it would be so much more approachable to throw dense text consisting of the following at someone: "In parallel with the software engineering research in architectural styles, the object-oriented programming community has been exploring the use of design patterns and pattern languages to describe recurring abstractions in object-based software development. A design pattern is defined as an important and recurring system construct. A pattern language is a system of patterns organized in a structure that guides the patterns' application [70]. Both concepts are based on the writings of Alexander et al. [3, 4] with regard to building architecture." That's so much simpler than "We need to be able to talk to all machines about all the stuff that’s on all the other machines. So we need some way of having one machine tell another machine about a resource that might be on yet another machine." Your wife may have understood it, but Ryan's wife lacked the CS background.
acangiano 15y ago
In fairness, he didn't call it, "How to explain REST to your wife" or "How to explain REST to your grandma". He is talking about his own wife, which happens to be ignorant about computer science. There is no assumption on his part.
- dextorious 15y ago
  Most women are ignorant about computer science. It's a fact, not an assumption. If you want the hard numbers check the number of ungraduates/graduates in CS/IT, for males and females. I'm saying that women are not capable of grasping IT (hell, the very first programmer was a woman, mrs. Lovelace). I'm saying that in actual, real life, they statistically don't want/care/attempt to. Maybe they are just smarter and go where the big money are these days (biology), as well as the better hours.
  - PotatoEngineer 15y ago
    Most men are ignorant of computer science, too. You're right in one aspect: of the very, very few people in the world who know about computer science, most (more than half, anyway) of them are men.
bradly 15y ago
His point is how he explained REST to someone with out a technical background. It just so happened that that person was his wife. If it was his dad instead, would there be any issue? https://gist.github.com/1525252 https://gist.github.com/1525252
jordan0day 15y ago
Somewhat glib question, but, if your wife didn't already know about REST, how did she fare with the dissertation? Is that what she really wanted? Was her response "Thanks for not treating me like a child?" or more "I don't really have time to read a doctoral dissertation. Can't you just give me the executive summary?" I mean, my wife is smarter than me and has a doctorate and a lot of letters after her name, but she's never cared to learn too much about how the drivetrain in a car works. If she asked a simple question like "How does a car's transmission work?", I highly doubt she'd be happy if I just linked her some pdf's covering the physics and mechanical engineering of CVT's and said, "you're welcome!"
- kstenerud 15y ago
  Relevant: http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/youre_welcome_college_students.png http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/youre_welcome_college_studen...

deleted 15y ago

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tfb 15y ago

This might help: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife&hl=en&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS401US418&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

kenjackson 15y ago

Wife: How does it work? Ryan: The web? Wife: Yeah. Ryan: Hmm. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason. Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser? Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff you type in there is one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing. Ryan went down a completely different path than I would have. I don't think most people who ask how the web works care about the http protocol. At least I wouldn't, if I didn't know better. I think I'd be more interested in how the network infrastructure is laid out and how requests get from my computer to a server and the data back and rendered. http is really just an implementation detail (people did this far before http existed).

gitah 15y ago
Well what you're talking about is the Internet and the TCP/IP stack. The World Wide Web is an application that runs on the Internet. To describe the Internet when someone asks how the web works would be like describing how the iOS works when someone is curious about a specific app.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Well no. Part of the web is the internet. You can't skip the internet and talk about resource representation caching in REST. But I am talking about the web -- that's why I mentioned how pages are rendered. HTTP and HTML, while both are fundamental to the web, are also just implementation details. HTTP has evolved a fair bit since its inception for the web (there was no PUT or POST, for example). To take your analogy, it would be like describing Cocoa library when your wife asks how an app works.

strags 15y ago

Wow... His "wife" seems to know exactly what questions to ask, and how to respond in precisely the correct manner as to move the conversation along: "Sounds like GET is a pretty important verb."

Vaanir 15y ago

That's oddly creepy, I was reading this last week after Googling "REST". Even though it's quite vague, even I learn one or two things, quite an interesting read! Something to share on Tweetbook I guess.

llambda 15y ago

Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763570 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763570