I love these discussions about text vs. binary protocols. I especially love the part where people defend binary protocols because they are more "efficient" and

I love these discussions about text vs. binary protocols. I especially love the part where people defend binary protocols because they are more "efficient" and don't eat as much bandwith or processing resources. May I remind these nice people that most text-based protocols we rely on today were designed in a time when CPUs were orders of magnitude slower and modems ran at 2400 baud? Talk about processing and bandwidth resources... The resources consumed by having to interpret a text-based protocol pale in comparison with the resources consumed by all the levels of abstraction that modern frameworks/language runtimes that we use today. But wait, these save developer time, so they are a good thing. So does having protocols that can be troubleshooted by a human with minimal tools.