[0]: RFCs 1459, 2810 - 2813, 7194.
Besides, a lot of these walled chat gardens roll their own XMPP/Jabber thingy behind the scenes.
Just because it's not well-known doesn't mean it's not widely used
Or as if the vibe-coder of today would've totally™ definitely© be the type of person to peruse the RFCs.
It's like saying the the proof of, say, Seifert-van Kampen theorem is "forgotten" because nowadays, my friend, people ask ChatGPT to write out solutions to their math homework.
(It seems extremely unlikely that the average non-junior engineer hasn’t opened up RFC 3339 or one of the HTTP caching RFCs, just for example.)
For example, you don't have to read the specific RFC to know the difference between 200, 400, and 500 status codes. Any layman's blog post (or literally just reading the response messages accompanying those codes in actual use) is enough knowledge to get you real far.
That said; if a senior dev isn't aware of 3339, the holiest of RFCs, then that's a problem.
Doubly so for the "meta" RFCs (eg 1925).
Can a hedgehog fly? Yes, if you kick it.
Dropped some toothpaste in my eye
Me no care, me no cry
Me just glad that cows don’t fly
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2468
There's quiet genius in that choice of number by the way. 2, 4, 6, 8, who do we appreciate?
Related: https://www.internetsociety.org/grants-and-awards/postel-ser...
The most recent picture of him on the Wikipedia article was at 74 and he still looked fairly spry.
With AI, companies are forcing people to churn them out faster than ever. It’s gotten to the point where, to keep up with this slop, people are using LLMs to summarize LLM-generated RFCs.
I specially dislike when some people try to do the same with internal documentation and still call "RFC 2029 Project Lifecycle" when it has been accepted by all the appropriate parties. It makes it harder to look for than needed, and it's not clear, by the name, if it has been passed or not.
If we desire something new, the RFC invites us to build upon it and not accept it as gospel.
Whether you, your project, or your organization accept it is completely disconnected with the concept of the RFC. You may procedurally accept it as unchallengeable gospel, but the truth remains that you can always have an opinion about it regardless.
P.S.
"The goal was to create a reliable, distributed communication system that could continue operating even if parts of it were damaged by a nuclear attack."
This is a myth. The ARPANET was not hardened; quite the opposite. ARPA's goal was for their researchers located across the country to easily share their work ... initially it was just used to share papers, before Ray Tomlinson invented email. Beyond that, JCR Licklider who laid the conceptual foundations was looking toward something along the lines of today's Internet + AI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%E2%80%93Computer_Symbiosis
P.P.S. Steve Crocker's MIT PhD thesis was on man-machine symbiosis. I know this because he mentioned it to me when I met him in the UCLA Computer Club which he came to because he wanted to teach an informal class on LISP and Theorem Proving, and the club organized such classes. We got to talking about his thesis, he posed some challenges to me that I got lucky in solving, and he offered me a job that shaped the rest of my life--I'm greatly indebted to him.
Thanks for reading my post. If you notice any incorrect information, please let me know anytime and I’ll update it
- What RFCs are useful to read if I want to learn networking well
- I heard that the best way to learn low-level programming is by rebuilding already existing programs. what high quality RFCs can I use as a guide to code-my-own <so and so program>
mlhpdx•2h ago