I was wondering does the 2,083 characters imposed by certain browsers (looks at IE) affect building REST APIs?
Considering the fact that the API request will probably be made from a programmatic interface or library like CURL or some other language specific library.
Does this limit also affect programmatically requesting a GET resource on the server?
The limit is totally arbitrary and is not originating from any standard or spec. That's also why tools and libraries like curl don't have that limit.
A limit can be valuable to have just to avoid the risk of abuse or various sorts of DOSes that a client could otherwise fall victim to. Exactly what that limit should be is of course subject to debate.
So yes, it can certainly affect users of REST APIs if you want to drive them from a browser or if the libs you use have the similar limits (like I would guess perhaps some of the Windows APIs may share the same limits that IE has).
