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by ken
2899 days ago
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> An author uses technical jargon and concepts familiar to his intended audience. Fielding's intended audience for his thesis is other people with PhDs. Perhaps, yet his blog is written in exactly the same style. Who are all these ComSci researchers who are most comfortable with these concepts and distinctions, anyway, and who are also designing web APIs? At some point, if you wish any real system to use your ideas, you need to communicate it in some way that explains it for a typical software developer. If you write a blog in the style of a thesis, only thesis committee members will ever want to read it, or be able to understand it. It's like the old story of the plumber who discovered hydrochloric acid clears clogs, and when he reported it, some scientists told him "The efficacy of hydrochloric acid is indisputable, but the corrosive residue is incompatible with metallic permanence", and he thanked them. Repeat several more exchanges, with even more jargon. Finally, they tell him "Don't use hydrochloric acid. It eats hell out of the pipes." |
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More than you realize, I'm sure. There are plenty of industry people who can understand theses and other research publications. You can find them here, on reddit, on stackoverflow, and on lambda-the-ultimate.
> At some point, if you wish any real system to use your ideas, you need to communicate it in some way that explains it for a typical software developer.
That's what books and blogs are supposed to be for, but how many of these people do you think spoke with Fielding before writing about REST to ensure they got it right?
Fielding's emphasis on abstract concepts are because REST isn't tied to HTTP, or HTML, or XML, or JSON. He's trying to explain calculus to you so you can solve many problems, and you keep focusing only on how to calculate velocity given acceleration just because that's the problem in front of you right now.