201–210 of 393 posts
https://www.google.com/search?q=top+words+that+have+changed+...
One I hate is "rougelike". I doesn't mean "like the game Rouge" (which might include Diablo and certainly includes Larn) Instead it now means any game with randomly generated levels but requires no other similarities to Rouge.
I've been in this industry two decades, but it's only in the past 5 years that I've noticed entire teams of absolute morons entering the field and being given six figure jobs without understanding what their job even is, much less how to do it properly. (And by "properly" I mean "know what a REST API is")
The industry is awash in quants who took a four week course in Python and are now called "data scientists"; backend software engineers who don't know what the fuck a 500 error is; senior developers who graduated a year ago; engineering managers who "hire DevOps"; product managers and DMs who don't know how to use Jira or run a stand-up. It's like all that's left is people who think they have "impostor syndrome" when they actually are impostors of professionals.
I tried to find a new job recently, and I couldn't find a single org with at least 50% of the staff properly understanding how to do their jobs. Of course half of them were bullshit VC-funded money-bleeding terrible businesses, and the other half were fat cash cows that through their industry dominance became lazy and stupid. Maybe we just hit peak tech, and all the good teams were formed by boring companies long ago and don't have new positions open. Or maybe all the good people cashed out and retired.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is me, 100%. I've seen enough to realize that progress is largely each generation re-thinking and re-mixing the previous generation's problems. Sometimes the remix makes things better, but plenty of times, older generation look at what's being done and says, "wow, you really don't understand what this was originally intended for" and there's a pain in that misunderstanding and inefficiency, watching work get red…
Since you have decided to expand beyond tech, I'd like to share a possibly optimistic perspective. We are instructed to think that progress is a straight line. Without any surprise, it is not. But I like to picture it with a direction nonetheless... upwards. So as it's not a straight line, I see it as a pulse, with its ups and downs, the ups usually being mild and the lows potentially dramatically sharp. But still so…
But not really: time is an upward spiral, which just looks like a flat circle from the wrong perspective. Sometimes the distance between coils is so small as to vanish. Our job is to shove the coil up as much as we can while we are here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfe...
The client knows nothing about the API end points associated with this data, except via URLs and hypermedia controls (links and forms) discoverable within the HTML itself. If the state of the resource changes such that the allowable actions available on that resource change (for example, if the account goes into overdraft) then the HTML response would change to show the new set of actions available. If the client kno…
> A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API). ...
> When I say hypertext, I mean the simultaneous presentation of information and controls such that the information becomes the affordance through which the user (or automaton) obtains choices and selects actions. Hypermedia is just an expansion on what text means to include temporal anchors within a media stream; most researchers have dropped the distinction.
> Hypertext does not need to be HTML on a browser. Machines can follow links when they understand the data format and relationship types.
That is, htmx.org or intercoolerjs.org might argue that "HATEOAS is [exclusively] for humans", but Roy Fielding doesn't agree, or didn't in 02008.
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While I'm arguing, I'd also like to take exception to the claim that this discussion is irrelevant to anything people are doing today. It's an "old person battle," as some say, in the sense that old people are the people who have enough perspective to know what matters and what doesn't. REST matters, because it is an architectural style that enables the construction of applications that can endure for decades, permitting the construction of applications that evolve without a central administrator, remaining backwards-compatible with decades-old software, and can include billions of simultaneous users.
This is an important problem to solve, the WWW isn't the last such application anyone ever needs to build, and JSON RPC interfaces can't build one.
The trouble with redefining "REST" to mean "not REST" is that the first step in learning known techniques to solve a problem is learning the terminology that people use to explain the techniques. If you think you know the terminology, but you have the wrong definition in your mind, you will not be able to understand the explanations, and you will not be able to figure out why you can't understand them, until you finally figure out that the definition you learned was wrong.
I feel like the author has conflated hypertext with html. The REST interface should be self describing, but that can be done in JSON. If you go to Roy Fielding's post... there is a comment where someone asks for clarification, and he responds: > When I say hypertext, I mean the simultaneous presentation of information and controls such that the information becomes the affordance through which the user (or automaton)…
I found that json-ld, json-hal and other "describe your json" standards were needed to make json human readable-ish. I hate that there are many competing standards and the link syntax feels clumsy. JSON5 for "add comments, allow ES6 features" was perfect for private and in a small team use for a while. No one seems to listen to the JSON inventor, who said he regrets creating a misnomer name and no successor should us…
The P in API is programmer’s. Specifically it is a programattic call.
REST says you get hyperlinks, which are effectively documentation in the response.
Which is nice.
But a program isn’t a person it doesn’t need docs in the response.
And URL links are not sufficient documentation to use the interface.
So I don’t get the REST use case outside of some university AI project where your program might try to “make sense”’of the API.
And therefore I have never tried to use REST and I have never seen anyone else either at anywhere I have worked.
It is a nonsense concept to me.
REST API is a contradiction in terms.
The client knows nothing about the API end points associated with this data, except via URLs and hypermedia controls (links and forms) discoverable within the HTML itself. If the state of the resource changes such that the allowable actions available on that resource change (for example, if the account goes into overdraft) then the HTML response would change to show the new set of actions available. If the client kno…
Fielding isn't saying the client should know nothing about the meaning of the responses. He's saying that what the client knows about the meaning of the responses is derived by interpreting them according to the media type, which doesn't have to be HTML, rather than, for example, by looking at the URL. Quoting from what Fielding wrote in his post and comments: > A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge be…
That's a conclusion I came to after watching it never catch on in the JSON API space and then trying to come up with an explanation as to why. I'd love to hear what he thinks of the idea.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment!
I want the author of htmx to get together with the guy from pandastrike and rant about the misuse of REST for an hour a week. It would be my new favorite podcast.