Comment by infecto
3 days ago
So you enjoy being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic? I see no useful benefit either from a professional or social setting to act like this.
I don’t find this method of discovery very productive and often regardless of meeting some standard in the API the real peculiarities are in the logic of the endpoints and not the surface.
I can see a value in pedantry in a professional setting from a signaling point of view. It's a cheap way to tell people "Hey! I'm not like those other girls, I care about quality," without necessarily actually needing to do the hard work of building that quality in somewhere where the discerning public can actually see your work.
(This is not a claim that the original commenter doesn't do that work, of course, they probably do. Pedants are many things but usually not hypocrites. It's just a qualifier.)
You'd still probably rather work with that guy than with me, where my preferred approach is the opposite of penalty. I slap it all together and rush it out the door as fast as possible.
>> "Hey! I'm not like those other girls, I care about quality,"
OMG. Pure gold!
What some people call pedantic, others may call precision. I normally just call the not-quite-REST API styles as simply "HTTP APIs" or even "RPC-style" APIs if they use POST to retrieve data or name their routes in terms of actions (like some AWS APIs).
Like all things in life it’s about balance. If you are to say things like the person I replied to says he does you are ultimately creating friction for absolutely no gain. Hence why I said being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic or in other words, being difficult for no good reason. There is a time and place for everything but over a decade plus of working and building many different APIs I see no benefit.
I cannot even recall a time where it caused me enough issues to even think about it later on. The business logic. I have had moments where I thought something was strange in a Elasticsearch API but again it was of no consequence.