[hirstys]

Hmmm, but is REST so often conflated with 'just' CRUD, because that is all people really want from REST, or is it that this perception is so pervasive that people don't know what the potential is. Chicken or Egg? I'm saying Egg, but I'm not saying which that relates to :)

[clan]

CRUD is easy to understand and close to the core of tasks that programmers at large need to do.

Thinking in terms of REST requires that you concern yourself about the full infrastructure. Many programmers i have met simply do not care. Super nice properties such as cacheable and discoverable are outside their domain. Most simply just want remote RPC.

Try convincing a programmer of the benefits of HATEOAS is though. It will be dismissed as too much hassle with no real benefit.

But if you look at it from a data architectural perspective everything just "clicks". Few projects are however approached from that angle.

[tjpnz]

HATEOS can be a weighty concept to get across and it never clicked for me until I read a book on it. I still think there are aspects of it that could be learned easily enough in isolation though. Understanding media types for example allows you to develop some really nice schemes for API versioning. But few people are even willing to learn that and just butcher their URLs instead.