I agree with all of that, except that procedure calls over a network have "failed". The funny thing is, the way REST is used at 99% of places is just... RPC. Pe

I agree with all of that, except that procedure calls over a network have "failed". The funny thing is, the way REST is used at 99% of places is just... RPC. People do everything as a POST request (because they're afraid of something being cached), or they may use GET for some things out of a misguided concession to REST, so the verbs really end up having little to do with the actual API semantics, they're just an implementation detail. HTTP may be idempotent, but it's up to the programmers to carry that ideal forward into their implementation. No one is doing programmatic (or even development-time) API discovery, so that aspect of REST goes to waste, also.