It’s not. It’s pretty much the opposite. This is what he’s talking about:
> our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction
> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.
> They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.
REST is the opposite. REST is “We did this. It worked great! This is why.” And web developers around the world are using this every single day in practical projects without even realising it. The average web developer uses REST, including HATEOAS, all the time, and it works great for them. It’s just when they set out to do it on purpose, they often get distracted by some weird fake definition of REST that is completely different.
That's absolutely not what the essay is about. It's about the misassignment of credit for the success of a technology by people who think the minutiae of the clever implementation was important.
I think you bring up an interesting tangential point that I might agree with--that the people doing the misalignment are how architecture astronauts remain employed.
But the core of Joel Spolsky's three posts on Architecture Astronauts is his expression of frustration at engineers who don't focus on delivering product value. These "Architecture Astronauts" are building layer on layer of abstraction so high that what results is a "worldchanging" yet extremely convoluted system that no real product would use.
> "What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build."
> "this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out."
It’s not. It’s pretty much the opposite. This is what he’s talking about:
> our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction
> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.
> They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.
REST is the opposite. REST is “We did this. It worked great! This is why.” And web developers around the world are using this every single day in practical projects without even realising it. The average web developer uses REST, including HATEOAS, all the time, and it works great for them. It’s just when they set out to do it on purpose, they often get distracted by some weird fake definition of REST that is completely different.
That's absolutely not what the essay is about. It's about the misassignment of credit for the success of a technology by people who think the minutiae of the clever implementation was important.
I think you bring up an interesting tangential point that I might agree with--that the people doing the misalignment are how architecture astronauts remain employed.
But the core of Joel Spolsky's three posts on Architecture Astronauts is his expression of frustration at engineers who don't focus on delivering product value. These "Architecture Astronauts" are building layer on layer of abstraction so high that what results is a "worldchanging" yet extremely convoluted system that no real product would use.
A couple choice quotes from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...:
> "What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build."
> "this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out."