[jerf]

I would submit you also have the causality backward and are also talking about the results of the current factoring, not the cause. It is definitely not true that you have a choice between response/request and an abstractionless formless mass of a socket. I offer you XMPP as one readily-available counterexample. HTTP itself, if properly and fully implemented, is actually another. It worked itself into a streaming protocol, and many frameworks never noticed. This is part of the reason this cheeses me off so much, because even the putatively-HTTP frameworks can't actually speak the fullness of HTTP. Oh, and good luck supporting the full range of SPDY in your request-response framework.

The idea that streaming can't have abstractions put on it is beyond bizarre.