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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

Yep, number of new MCP servers this month is on track to be the highest it has ever been: https://bloomberry.com/data/mcp/

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"MCP" is the new "API" (MCP over streaming HTTP, after all, is just an API with a structured payload wrapper and defined interactions).

It is only going to continue to proliferate in usage and adoption.

With the v2 spec, MCP became a lot closer to APIs by becoming stateless. And there is now a push to use HTTP verbs more extensively to improve caching even better in v3. MCP is converging into APIs but wit great auth and auditing

... Are both of you using "API" as a synonym for "REST"?

This is the worst moment in time to talk about "REST".

Do you mean the Roy Fielding "REST" or the HTTP API "REST"?

Calling the latter "REST" is wrong. It's like calling a hermit crab a snail.

Edit: I forgot to mention, the former is gaining relevance as the elusive evolvable clients are now a thing.

I'm not trying to be a dick, but it's pretty hilarious that we made these two posts at the exact same time [0]. I totally get what you're saying, but I don't understand the motivation behind it. A properly designed HTTP API is what Roy Fielding was discussing in his dissertation, but he was obviously talking about HTML pages full of hyperlinks. At the end of the day, does it really matter much if the definition is only 80% correct if the majority of the population understands the basic gist of the conversation?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49908582

Unironically, Roy Fielding had a point.

If you can build the ultimate evolvable client, then you can collapse all UI into a single client.

Basically Roy Fielding told us to build an API that can only be operated by a human like intelligence, nobody could implement that because such an intelligence did not exist (hence the switch to imperfect HTTP APIs), and now that LLMs are a thing, said human like intelligence exists. This means Roy Fielding wasn't wrong, he was 25 years too early and ironically people should be building real REST APIs in the pendantic academic sense from today on and not the "pragmatic" HTTP API.

It's annoying, but that's been pretty common for the last decade. It's just like how everyone uses "REST" to mean "JSON RPC". In the end, we all basically know what the other ones are talking about, so it's pretty pointless to get bogged down in semantics.

It's common when talking about web services, where the kind of API is generally unambiguous. The problem here is we're discussing different kinds of APIs (shell commands, MCP, REST / JSON RPC) and so calling one of those kinds of APIs "API" is very confusing.

Seems like in this context API means HTTP API lol

"REST" is one of many way to implement APIs.

Exactly. It's confusing to talk about MCP vs API when "API" describes the whole class of possible values, of which "MCP" is one of them.

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