Hell is Other Representations

Every single pleasant programming practice I know allows for total control over the representations;
if not that, then the involved representations are inoffensive, and if not that then pushed to those
boundaries of the problem where they may be safely ignored after simple translations.  Any exercises
in programming where representation be omnipresent, where it may not be easily ignored in anyway, is
hell.  To transform data is the essence of all programming, and such exercises get in the way of it.

Network programming is generally not too unpleasant, because the assumption is to join together very
different systems.  The Internet is specified in packets of octets, aligned to thirty-two bit words,
but it's not too terribly difficult to transform the data into pleasant representations for whatever
problems are placed, and careful programming often prohibits directly transforming the packets' data
for speed or convenience, due to concerns of malice.  It's dealing with data formats that's painful.

Most data formats nowadays appear to be specified recursively, in terms of some other, terrible data
format, until some terrible bedrock is hit.  Shitty systems and bedrock give most formats most awful
assumptions, and it's common to see systems that expect everything to be treated as an character, or
octet, interchangeably, often because the format designer probably never used a language with proper
types.  It's common to see data formats specifically designed to use the machine representations for
speed, disadvantaging any implementation that needs to do even a little processing to the data.  IBM
machines have co-processors capable of outsourcing these transformations, but those machines typical
to most instead have the whole system bent over to make some work convenient, and to leave any other
transformations in the cold.  Some then start to get the idea that they be more natural than others.

Programming is mathematics, and the absolute worst part of it is the ability of fools to define some
improper abstraction or utterly disgusting representation that makes better work hard or impossible.