Comment by astrobe_

> The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency.

You know the rule, "pick 2 out of 3". For a CPU, converting "123" would be a pain in the arse if it had one. Oh, and hexadecimal is even worse BTW; octal is the most favorable case (among "common" bases).

Flexibility is a bit of a problem too - I think people generally walked back from Postel's law [1], and text-only protocols are big "customers" of it because of its extreme variability. When you end-up using regexps to filter inputs, your solution became a problem [2] [3]

30% more bandwidth is absolutely huge. I think it is representative of certain developers who have been spoiled with grotesquely overpowered machines and have no idea any idea of the value of bytes, bauds and CPU cycles. HTTP3 switched to binary for even less than that.

The argument that you can make up for text's increased size by compressing base64 is erroneous; one saves bandwidth and processing power on both sides if you can do away without compression. Also, with compressed base64 you've already lost the readability on the wire (or out of the wire since comms are usually encrypted anyway).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS