The whole stateful/stateless choice isn't intuitive unless you've at least read discussions about a few protocol designs/implementations which made these choice

The whole stateful/stateless choice isn't intuitive unless you've at least read discussions about a few protocol designs/implementations which made these choices. It isn't about intelligence. No wait, I might be wrong here -- this ought to be obvious for people so young that they grew up doing web programming? Do educated developers really say that? (I haven't followed the rfcs for quite a long time, so I probably do lots Dunning–Krugers myself now. :-) ) Edit: I remember when WWW took over from Gopher. I thought "Damn, a superior alternative that won't win because a first-come implementation already filled the niche." Then came Mosaic which could show pictures -- and WWW took over. I was happy and disgusted at the shallowness. :-)