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My personal "wow, it's just this?" moment came when, in high school, I figured out how to IRC from a Unix box that didn't have an IRC client installed, just by
by mjn 13y ago
My personal "wow, it's just this?" moment came when, in high school, I figured out how to IRC from a Unix box that didn't have an IRC client installed, just by telnetting to the IRC server. The only particularly annoying part was that you'd get disconnected if you were idling and didn't respond to a PING with a PONG quickly enough.
It was also a fun way to learn programming. mIRC at some point added a sockets interface to mIRC script, and after that it was pretty easy to write toy clients for various text-based protocols, doing simple things like checking whether a URL was a 404. I can't say I did anything particularly useful with that, but it was a nice way to learn something about programming.
- thibauts 13y agoI remember just about the same, some 15 years back. Discovering networks and being able to mess with them, even though my programming skills were still very basic. This is a good part of what made me enjoy programming. Exploring this world, feeling it within grasp. I think TAOUP sums up a few important points about text protocols [1] and why going binary is not always wise. Obviously the main drive here is money and I'm sure we all have stories where short term money translates later to large unforseen and/or hidden costs. Bandwidth capacity is growing exponentially so do we really need this, even for the savings ? I'd rather see people invent clever new ways to do wonders with text streams than go back to opaque and obscure data structures that bring back to me rememberances of old days proprietary protocols. After all, if our fathers made the choice of text streams at a time when each byte cost much more than now, there may be good reasons. [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html