REST APIS suck for nested resources. GraphQL is a huge breakthrough in managing them.

Ever seen an engineer do a loop and make n+1 REST calls for resources? It happens more often then you think because they don't want to have to create a backend ticket to add related resources to a call.

With internal REST for companies I have seen so many single page specific endpoints. Gross.

> There have been different opinions about structuring REST calls but those aren't going to cause any real forward progress for the industry and are inconsequential when it comes to business outcomes.

You could argue almost any tech solution in a non-pure tech play is largely in consequentially as long as the end goal of the org is met, but managing REST APIS were a huge point of friction at past companies.

Either it goes through a long review process to make sure things are structured "right" (ie lots of opinions that nobody can sync on) or people just throw up rest endpoints willynilly until you have no idea what to use.

GraphQL is essentially the "Black" for Python Syntax but for Web APIs. Ever seen engineers fight over spaces vs tabs, 8 vs 4 spaces, whether a space before a colon? those fights happened a lot and then `black` came out and standardized it so there was nothing to fight over.

GraphqL makes things very clear and standard, but can't please everyone.

Harder to get a promotion when you’re doing something that’s old, boring, and just works.

XML still has its usage and is excellent to quickly validate documents, but JSON clearly won in this use case because it was kept simple, stupid.

I think IDLs and gRPC in particular are a meaningful advancement in the problem space. The ecosystem and productivity that they enable via programatic tooling were really eye-opening for me (The OpenAPI ecosystem is, imo, extremely poor). They also have better support for modern techniques like streaming and even load-balanced streaming.

I think us engineers have an inherent desire to try to innovate, and I think that is a good thing. Some problems will require a lot of wrong turns before finding the right path, but that is simply the nature of innovation

JSON winning over XML is like saying CSV won over MySQL. They aren't equivalent.

Much like CSV, JSON isn't particularly standardised and different parsers and writers will do different things in some situations. Usually it doesn't matter, but when it does you're probably in for a lot of pain.

If you handle structured data and the structures might change over time, JSON isn't a good fit. Maybe you'll opt for JSON Schema, maybe that'll work for your use case, but with XML you can be quite sure it'll be reliable and well understood by generations of developers.

The tooling is generally very good, commonly you can just point your programming language to the XSD and suddenly you have statically typed classes to program against. Perhaps you'd like to store the data in a RDBMS? You can probably generate the DB schema from the XSD. If you want you can just throw JSON into MongoDB instead, but there will be very important tradeoffs. Same goes for UI, you can write some XSLT based on the XML schema and suddenly you get web views directly from API responses. Or you could use those classes you generated and have your GUI code consume such objects.

None of this is as easy with JSON as it is with XML, similar to how many things aren't as easy with CSV as with a RDBMS.

> and most likely a lot of the software we write will cease to be running in a decade

If only that were true in my experience.