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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

The thing that confuses me with semantic drift, is that nobody stops at any point to make a word for what the other word used to mean. It's very hard to refer, at this point, to "the thing that people meant when they said REST ~15 years ago." Can't we just come up with another jargon term for that, that isn't being squatted on?

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That's usually a sign that the thing that didn't get a new word is not actually all that useful or interesting.

Highly debatable. A (too quick?) Darwinist perspective would tell us that the original ReST was not fit. And the "new" ReST (aka, JSON-RPC) is more fit.

Fit in its current ecosystem, of course.

That's exactly what I meant. The "new REST" appropriated the term because it's what's actually being used. The "old REST" didn't get a new term because it's not actually being used.

There are still theoretical discussions around "old REST", but they all have "new REST isn't REST at all" as their core point, so the lack of new terminology is deliberate there.

We use the old REST a lot and call that what you name "new REST" Json-RPC. What's so difficult about naming things what they are? I mean Devs do have some brain. That's why we are able to write cool software. But then why are some of us too stupid to get that REST thing right?

There is already a standard called JSON RPC and it is not RESTful at all. RESTful means you are using HTTP verbs to convey some information. This is a “mostly stupid” idea, but it has caught on. RESTful is an now industry buzzword. So this is what the pragmatics implement.

We may as well have a debate on what object oriented really means before implementing something, but again, the pragmatic will just create a structure that is broadly recognizable as object oriented.

People do try to come up with new terms. I've seen such suggestions blog posts and comment boards.

The issue is getting everyone to agree with your new word or to even recognize the problems of semantics.

Many people also deliberately misuse the existing terms to get advantages. For example, DevOps in your title gives you a higher pay despite often being materially the same as a pure operations role or sys admin.

Good point. My only idea would be to say it in-extenso: representational state transfer...

People often mean CRUD when they say REST.

Already done: "hypermedia"

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