There is no REST in a wicked stateless world

I’ve heard it said that computers are the dumbest creatures on the planet. They only do exactly as they are told, and they take your instructions in an extremely literal way. This is what makes programming a computer so difficult. You must choose exactly the right syntax and structure your ideas precisely and succinctly because any ambiguity will result in a bug.

There is only one way to make our lives hard, and that is to base our work and our careers on a system with the attention span of a fruit fly. I’m talking about web servers, of course. The term web server can mean two different things: it can refer to hardware or software. The hardware is any computer system running the software. I’ve seen people build web server hardware that fits in a matchbox, and I’ve seen web server hardware fill expansive rack mount systems in specially cooled data centers. In truth, for us at least, the hardware is the boring...