meshcaline?

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

You wonder where the neologism meshcaline comes from?

It has two origins:

• mesh: I believe that a mesh is an appropriate visual representation for the concept of a hypertext driven API: While the real power of an API is provided by its individual resources (the mesh) what you see from the whole thing are primarily the edges (the links)
• mescaline: This psychedelic substance occurs naturally in the peyote cactus and has been used from earliest recorded time for medical and cultural purposes. In the 1960s the drug was quite popular amongst people that wanted to find a different truth beyond the obvious reality. While drugs definitively won't help you in designing a good API, questioning the given and seeking for the better is a trait good API designers have. Being listed in the US Dispensatory to help against hysteria seems to be another allusion to the need not to blindly follow each trend, regardless how many protagonists there may be.

Beyond the nice analogies to this project the word has some additional properties that seemed to fit quite well:

• The word meshcaline is both a noun (naming the concept) as well as an adjective (describing the individual characteristics of a design)
• Some people immediately had the association masculine. While I hope that female developers find the concepts equally appealing, having broad shoulders (metaphorically speaking) helps when you argue against popular wisdom.
• Being associated with a drug hopefully prevents the word to become a popular marketing term, so that people who use it, know why and what they use it for.
• If more people find the ideas in this blog worth to work on/with, we can form the tribe of meshcaleros