I just spent a nice evening with some friends and for a while talked about REST, but in a roundabout way. But the interesting thing was that on the way home, I explained all this to my nine year old daughter and she understood the fundamentals right away. For generic interfaces, the analogy she had was "It doesn't matter if you are buying cat food or dog food, you are still buying something." (That's because she knows I work at Amazon and buying is an important concept.) Another analogy she made was that the delete key on the keyboard works regardless of what you are deleting. It would be nice if professional programmers were so open minded in their exploration of large scale networked architectures and REST.