>At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes—

>At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes—bytes!— and be all-around more manageable by software. >It wasn’t long, however, before I realized the true genius behind this decision. This reminded me very much of a talk by Jonathan Blow where he's talking about how he "nerd raged" while reading the Doom source code. He found a section that wasn't optimized, but in fact not optimizing it had so many other benefits (besides, the performance gain would have been negligible). Starts at 14 minutes: http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/ http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independe...