[icebraining]

REST has been extremely successful, having scaled to billions of services, like the one we're using right now.

"RESTful APIs" have mostly been a failure, I fully agree with you on that. The difference is that I think it's a cultural problem; when people like Licklider sensibly thought about a future wherein computers would learn to talk to each other (of which REST is a first step), as static protocols obviously didn't scale, we proved him wrong by sheer brute force. Watching something like Bret Victor's The Future of Programming, it's hard to miss the giant indictment of our whole profession.

That said, since I know the term is hopelessly lost, I don't push for REST either. Our service uses XML/JSON-RPC.