The 7-bit Internet
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The Accidental Businessman[^]:
When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based. At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes — bytes! — and be all-around more manageable by software. It wasn’t long, however, before I realized the true genius behind this decision.
Obscurity and obsessive abstraction are two of the worst problems that affect software development.
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The Accidental Businessman[^]:
When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based. At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes — bytes! — and be all-around more manageable by software. It wasn’t long, however, before I realized the true genius behind this decision.
Obscurity and obsessive abstraction are two of the worst problems that affect software development.
Terrence Dorsey wrote:
Obscurity and obsessive abstraction are two of the worst problems that affect software development.
Too true. http://xkcd.com/974/[^]
10 PRINT "Software is hard. - D. Knuth" 20 GOTO 10