[tptacek]

It's not my argument that cs 101 students can't write recursive resolvers. Everyone can, and more people should, just like more people should write emulators, compilers, database engines, TCP/IP stacks, ray tracers, and computer algebra systems. Not because writing them is a huge achievement for humanity, but because people writing them and then documenting the process is vitally important for demystifying these things, in an era where most programming is just piping data from one database to another and we've lost touch with so much basic computer science.

My argument is that DNS codecs are not the interesting or tricky part of writing recursive resolvers.

Having had the pleasure of writing a bunch of DNS codecs, I'm having trouble even conceptualizing what's interesting about writing one. I don't think most people look at DNS and think "I could do this, but for the difficulty of constructing an NS record".