This is an excellent summary and expresses many things I've thought about when these topics come up. I entered industry in 1998 and didn't understand as well wh

This is an excellent summary and expresses many things I've thought about when these topics come up. I entered industry in 1998 and didn't understand as well what was happening while it was happening, but came to similar conclusions looking back on it. > I'm a developer used to simply clicking a button in Visual Studio to have it instantly bulk-generate entire API client libraries from a WSDL XML API schema, documentation and all. So when I hear REST people talk about how much simpler JSON is, I have no idea what they're talking about. One issue with that was a lot of developers never had any understanding of what was actually happening when they used wsdl.exe or the Visual Studio GUI to do that. Funny story: a partner we work with now gave us a SOAP API to consume that just about had to have been developed by one of these idiots. Most of the payload was XML content that fit different schemas depending on the transaction type. They didn't know how to model this properly so they just had a content node whose contents were a string that contained escaped XML; exactly what would happen if you were told to make content dynamic and didn't know anything about XML but only how to use the serialized objects in C#: you have an object with a content property that is a string, and you just put arbitrary XML into that string. So you'd get these API responses that were clearly formatted SOAP envelope and then Bespoke Envelope and then unreadable gibberish littered with > < etc.