mark nottingham

Sean’s Words of Wisdom

Tuesday, 20 April 2004

HTTP APIs

Sean McGrath always has carefully considered positions, and he hits it out of the ballpark with this one. A few thoughts;

Eventually though, to fully realise RESTian SOA we need to get linguistic determinism working for us, not against us. To do that, we need to bake key SOA distributed computing concepts right into the language.

Surely you mean that we should bake in REST, no?

In the case of the all important concept of dynamic typing, this means we need to take dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, Smalltalk as our starting point. We need to relegate the wilful act of compilation to a deployment-time optimization — not (as it currently is) a central tenet of the programming model.

Ah, Sean, you had me at “Python.” This is a sentiment that I’m hearing from many different directions; it looks like the world is slowly catching on that compile/debug isn’t such a great way to do things, and that static typing isn’t the only path to good code.