Good lord you're a troll. 0. Few people who use this quote actually know its origin and context. 1. Scribd, Hulu, Justin.tv, Slideshare... there are tons of r

Good lord you're a troll. 0. Few people who use this quote actually know its origin and context. 1. Scribd, Hulu, Justin.tv, Slideshare... there are tons of ruby sites in the top 500, not just Twitter. 2. Serialization isn't just on the wire, it also may be stored in memcache or the like. But even on the wire, crossection bandwidth is scarce in large clusters. There's a reason google developed protocol buffers. 3. Debugging by wire sniffing is shitty period. I don't think binary vs ascii is very meaningful. What matters more is the infrastructure on each end, eg do the client and server have good reflection, monitoring and logging capabilities. These are what affect programmer time. 4. This is a RPC format. Sending payloads to browsers is not a use case. Even so on modern javascript implementations decoding a byte packed binary format is likely faster than the eval path used by naive browser JSON parsers because it doesn't build any intermediate forms like token streams, ASTs, etc. 5. Same as 4. Your view is both myopic and hyperbolic.