---
title: Being Textual
abstract: Humans like reading, too.
categories:
- work
content-tags:
- programming
---

"When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes" -[ESR][1]

   [1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html

Amen. I've recently been fighting performance-driven webservicephobia.  Here, quite a bit before web services became mainstream (or were so named), ESR was tackling these fears.
