REST is short for Representational State Transfer. I'd place that into the category of names that makes more sense once you understand what REST is, but isn't quite so helpful in terms of explaining it. REST is often heard in the context of web services. When it was suggested as a topic for me to write about it was described to me as a web service but doing "the query string thing" to pass it parameters. That's not really what it's about, though.

Verbs and nouns

Verbs are doing words. Examples in natural language are "pay", "drink" and "shock". In most programming paradigms, we spend a lot of time defining how to do things, by writing methods, subroutines or functions. These are our programming equivalent of verbs.

Nouns represent entities. Examples in natural language are "money", "beer" and "mother". Whenever we have data in our program and we somehow identify it (for example, by name binding or variable declaration), these are just like nouns in natural language...