My 2c<br><br>I do not claim any of this to be scientific opinion or backed by any data.<br><br>I do not yet have any lisp stuff in production (as in web servers). The day I do. I&#39;d like to be confident that I can troubleshoot slime connectivity issues if there are any (I don&#39;t yet know how that setup is going to be). I use slime, but in dev I don&#39;t care much about slime connectivity issues.<br>

<br>To this day I still find the ability to do  a simple telnet to execute http very useful. It takes away all of client side issues. This is point  #1<br><br>If all of slime is turned binary and serves the purpose of performance, then that&#39;s ok. Doing only a header in binary for performance seems dubious. This is point #2.<br>

<br>My opinion (again) is that <br>a. http, html, javascript, css are all crappy (in the sense they did not take into account the accumulated knowledge at the point of their design or lack thereof)<br>b. they are all enormously successful (for some measure of success for whatever related and/or disjoint reasons)<br>

c. they are (or were) all purely text based<br><br>I think #c has a lot to do with #b (don&#39;t ask for proof cause I have none) even though it&#39;s not the only reason. This is point #3.<br><br>An unrelated point - I saw somewhere a mention of fixed versus variable length as if that has anything to do with text versus binary. Those are orthogonal. The point may be that 4 bytes of binary gets 4bn versus that requiring maybe 10 or 11 bytes in utf8 if it were fixed length.<br>

<br>I only lurk on the slime list. I don&#39;t contribute to the code or the discussion (due to priorities, laziness, and incompetence). I  am writing this cause I am afraid this is the wrong decision.<br><br>As I said all of the above is unscientific, but i hope it is considered.<br>

<br>Thanks for reading<br>-Antony<br><br>