In hindsight, the idea that ambiguous text-based parsing with in-line delimiters was considered a hallmark of a "simple protocol" is quite silly. Yes, such prot

In hindsight, the idea that ambiguous text-based parsing with in-line delimiters was considered a hallmark of a "simple protocol" is quite silly. Yes, such protocols are simple to implement for the happy path - it certainly made sense back when people primarily interacted with networks through the shell or a REPL. But it's clear that a sound and scalable wire format designed today should use binary encodings for compactness and performance, explicit lengths instead of delimiters for variable-length data to avoid the complexity of escape sequences, and fixed-length fields placed before variable-length fields to minimize memory allocation churn.