As an "elder" in our industry, I encounter "old people arguments" on a regular basis. A few observations that seem to apply here:<p>1. Naming things is hard. Sometimes a thing gets a name for a reason that made sense a long time ago, but things evolve, and the original name no longer makes sense.<p>This isn't necessarily a problem. Nobody cares that we no longer typeset words and print images on paper, physically cut them out, and then physically paste them onto a board, which we take a picture of and use the picture to run the phototypesetter (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting</a>).<p>Yes, I am old enough to have worked on hybrid publishing system that used laser printers to create text that was physically copied and pasted in the manner described above. No, I don't argue that "cut" and "paste" are the wrong words to describe what happens in editing software.<p>So if we use the term "REST" today in a manner that doesn't agree with how the coiner of the term meant it when discussing the architecture of a distributed hypermedia system... Sure, why not, that's ok. We also don't use terms like "OOP" or "FP" precisely the way the terms were used when they were first coined, and for that matter, we probably don't all agree on exactly what they mean, but we agree enough that they're useful terms.<p>What else matters? Well...<p>2. Sometimes arguing about what the words used to mean is a proxy for arguing about the fact that what we consider good design has changed, and some people feel it may not be for the better.<p>That's always a valuable conversation to have. We sometimes do "throw out the baby with the bathwater," and drop ideas that had merit. We footgun ourselves for a while, and then somebody rediscovers the old idea.<p>The original OOP term was about hiding internal state, yes, and about co-locating state with the operations upon that state, yes, but it was also about message-passing, and for a long time we practiced OOP with method calling and not message-passing, and sure enough, we had to rediscover that idea in Erlang and then Elixir.<p>Forget whether the things we do with JSON should or shouldn't be called "REST-ful" because they aren't the same was what the word was intended to describe way back when. Good questions to ask are, "What did that original definition include that isn't present now?" "Woudl our designs be better if we behaved more like that original definition?" "What problems did the original definition address?" "Do we still have those problems, and if so, are they unsolved by our current practices?"<p>If there's something good that we've dropped, maybe we will get a lot of value out of figuring out what it is. And if we want to bring it back, it probably won't be by exactly replicating the original design, maybe we will develop entirely new ways to solve the old problems that match the technology we have today.<p>TL;DR<p>The question of whether an old term still applies or not can generate a lot of debate, but little of it is productive.<p>The question of whether an old design addressed problems that we no longer solve, but could solve if we recognized the problems and set about solving them with our current technology is always interesting.