Norman Walsh gives up ‘wrestling his way through the arcana of WSDL’. He describes his frustrations with WSDL complexities and the difficulty of getting things done.

He goes on:

Now suppose the implementation of great_circle_distance was a web service. It could be a straight-forward REST web service or it could be some sort of RPC or it could be something else. As a programmer writing WITW, I don’t care! What has to happen is, I declare the function and then I use it. A little boilerplate is OK, but making me understand URIs or GET or POST or XML isn’t. [Emphasis mine]
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Allow me to paraphrase taking the world of SQL as an example: “…but making me understand which tables are which, and the difference between SELECT and UPDATE … isn’t”.

Surely that’s going a little too far in the other direction?

Later:

Sam Ruby, linking to this post, ponders object relational mapping frameworks and simplicity, while reminiscing on concise cylinder and head placement of data in the days of yore.

(I too remember calculating optimum cylinder and track positions on separate spindles for the data in the (then) DL/1-based SAP R/2 databases I worked with, while scoffing at the new kid on the block, DB2, with its newfangled ‘relational’ model, which was obviously not going to last…)

Anyway, his question and statement

What is simplicity? We all think we know what it is.
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succinctly puts the finger on one of the real reasons for a lot of the debates that wax and wane as technologies and ideas come and go.