> I was very surprised to learn that it is actually just a “regular” network protocol for two parties to communicate like HTTP, FTP, IMAP, SMPT and etc. With t

> I was very surprised to learn that it is actually just a “regular” network protocol for two parties to communicate like HTTP, FTP, IMAP, SMPT and etc. With the important distinction that all those protocols very intentionally use human readable ASCII requests/responses. Of course, for performance sake, ease of debugability was sacrificed. Which increases the value of a standard library to hide the protocol.