[eulerphi]

Imagine trying to fit a vault in a cubbyhole meant for shoes. That's what RESTful APIs end up fighting with. I would gander that because DELETE refers to permanent deletion, whereas destroy is reversible, they chose to use the less confusing verb.

The real problem with trying to conform to REST is that there's no rigorous definition, and this leads to the same verb being used for slightly different purposes among APIs.

[aaronem]

There is a rigorous definition of REST; it's called RFC 2616. [1] That probably most people who implement it don't pay as much attention to it as they should doesn't make it any less existent.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html