> To answer it, we need to rewind to the year 1998. Nobody had ever heard of JSON (2002) or REST (2000) or SOAP. But people had heard of S-expressions, which a

> To answer it, we need to rewind to the year 1998. Nobody had ever heard of JSON (2002) or REST (2000) or SOAP. But people had heard of S-expressions, which are far more appropriate for data transfer than XML. And the canonical S-expression spec, from 1997, is rather less than 30 pages: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt