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On Mon, 10 Feb 2003 15:38:02 +0000, Alaric B. Snell <alaric@alaric- snell.com> wrote: > Much rather design them to be general in the first case. > > "Practical extraction and reporting language" - no more! > > "HyperText Transfer Protocol" - no more! > > "Simple Object Access Protocol" - no more! That might be a nice world to live on, but it's not the one we live in. What endangers most endangered species? Their hyper-specialization to a specific habitat, AFAIK. What characterizes the most successful species such as Homo sapiens and Rattus rattus? Their ability to adapt to anything. Humans are not well-equipped as predators (no claws, blunt teeth, can't run fast ...) but who would you bet on in a showdown between a kludgy generalist human and a specialized predator tiger? Poor kitty doesn't stand a chance. A Hypertext Transfer Protocol that couldn't handle CGI-ish things would have died in about 1994. A Simple Object Access Protocol would have died as soon it smacked into the limitations of object access over the Internet. These things are ubiquitous now because of all the extra stuff that they could do easily, not the core stuff they did well.
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