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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2024

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  • my problem is not with words changing there meaning its with words losing meaning.

    rest api today means any api ontop of http where response bodies are json, but nothing more, we can’t get much more general when talking about web apis than that, “rest” is almost meaningless and we don’t have a new word describing APIs that adhere to the constraints of what restful meant, but those are a useful tool for building web applications that can easily be used by a web browser. no matter if you like fielding-rest-style-apis or not, you lost the ability to call them by a name and gained murky mumbo jumbo for it.


  • I’d Agree in most cases, but not in this one.

    Rigor in definitions allows us to express a lot of complex things in a compact form. this allows us to treat “Cars” as something different than “Motorcycles” while both a motorized vehicles.

    the same is true for REST-API and other API-Types, while all of them are just a means to allow services to exchange data, they tell us a lot about how this exchange happens and what to expect, but only if we use the words in a way that they represent the concept they were meant to represent. Otherwise we end up with meaningless buzz words like “rest”, “agile”, “scrum”, “artificial intelligence” and so forth, instead of meaningful terms found in the jargon of other engineering disciplines like “magnetism”, “gravity” or “motor”.