To be fair, I've at least taken the approach of starting with HTTP for many projects (knowing I'll probably ditch it at some point) - the author does have a point about it being very easy to debug using things like wget and your web browser.
Sure, but if we were working on something like skype, or a multiplayer gaming network, or an instant messaging system, HTTP wouldn't be an obvious choice.
Maybe I missed the part in the article where it said "In the world of websites/webapps... etc" :)
