The great irony with soap is the whole point (iirc) was to avoid having to even look at the XML and just have your IDE and language tooling let you treat web services as libraries. If we had just swapped out XML for JSON (to please the ridiculous syntaxists that always plague technology choices) and maybe had someone write “SOAP: The Good Parts” to ditch some of the more “ambitious” subspecs we probably would have been better off. The book could have even had a clever title like “Clean SOAP” to ensure it caught on in our fashion-driven industry.

I'm pretty sure every technology that promised "you dont have to ever look at it, tooling will take care of it for you" has failed because eventually you do have to look at it, and no effort has been put in to make it look "nice"*

*except arguably compilers. Its very rare that people look at the asm output outside of specialized domains.

Sure, and this is why the syntaxists has a point about xml. As usual, it comes down to “things are hard to type” or “thinks are hard to read” when the abstractions leak.

And that is doubly stupid for SOAP which is passing messages as text.

Pass text messages, which are text so you can interpret what is being sent and received much more easily than a binary protocol, using only binary tools.

Maybe it's more of a thing in certain circles but I see links to godbolt.org all the time.

You can't just swap XML for JSON because they are not equivalent, not to mention that SOAP had schemas and JSON doesn't (once you introduce schemas to JSON, you quickly realize that you gain nothing over XML).

I was simplifying, what really could have helped was coming up with better syntax for XML that was easier to read and write. I don’t care personally, but there are a lot of people who can’t get past syntax regardless of how nice or powerful the underlying semantics or abstractions are.

Agree mostly - except using HTTP methods is for simplicity and cache-ability. Not that that is necessarily well-observed or used.

It is super pretentious to list REST as a requirement on job postings when it always means writing web APIs is required.