

How I Explained REST to My Wife - aba_sababa
http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife

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kenjackson
_Wife: How does it work?

Ryan: The web?

Wife: Yeah.

Ryan: Hmm. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that
it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s
capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.

Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser?

Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff
you type in there is one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of
computing._

Ryan went down a completely different path than I would have. I don't think
most people who ask how the web works care about the http protocol. At least I
wouldn't, if I didn't know better. I think I'd be more interested in how the
network infrastructure is laid out and how requests get from my computer to a
server and the data back and rendered. http is really just an implementation
detail (people did this far before http existed).

~~~
gitah
Well what you're talking about is the Internet and the TCP/IP stack. The World
Wide Web is an application that runs on the Internet.

To describe the Internet when someone asks how the web works would be like
describing how the iOS works when someone is curious about a specific app.

~~~
kenjackson
Well no. Part of the web is the internet. You can't skip the internet and talk
about resource representation caching in REST. But I am talking about the web
-- that's why I mentioned how pages are rendered.

HTTP and HTML, while both are fundamental to the web, are also just
implementation details. HTTP has evolved a fair bit since its inception for
the web (there was no PUT or POST, for example).

To take your analogy, it would be like describing Cocoa library when your wife
asks how an app works.

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strags
Wow... His "wife" seems to know _exactly_ what questions to ask, and how to
respond in precisely the correct manner as to move the conversation along:

"Sounds like GET is a pretty important verb."

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tfb
This might help:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-
to-my-wife&hl=en&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS401US418&strip=1)

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Vaanir
That's oddly creepy, I was reading this last week after Googling "REST".

Even though it's quite vague, even I learn one or two things, quite an
interesting read! Something to share on Tweetbook I guess.

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llambda
Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763570>

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rabble
Gosh, i explained REST to my wife by explaining that it's just HTTP and then
sending her a link to Roy Fielding's doctoral dissertation. So frustrating to
assume that women can't be perfectly competent hackers in their own right.

~~~
jordan0day
Somewhat glib question, but, if your wife didn't already know about REST, how
did she fare with the dissertation? Is that what she really wanted? Was her
response "Thanks for not treating me like a child?" or more "I don't really
have time to read a doctoral dissertation. Can't you just give me the
executive summary?"

I mean, my wife is smarter than me and has a doctorate and a lot of letters
after her name, but she's never cared to learn too much about how the
drivetrain in a car works. If she asked a simple question like "How does a
car's transmission work?", I highly doubt she'd be happy if I just linked her
some pdf's covering the physics and mechanical engineering of CVT's and said,
"you're welcome!"

~~~
kstenerud
Relevant:
[http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/youre_welcome_college_studen...](http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/youre_welcome_college_students.png)

