I agree with this and I've raised it several times in Objective-C codebases that can some times end up littered with NSDictionary:s everywhere taking no advanta

I agree with this and I've raised it several times in Objective-C codebases that can some times end up littered with NSDictionary:s everywhere taking no advantage of the Objective-C type mechanics. I don't think it's necessarily as bad in python or javascript. This is because these languages are dynamically typed and that diminishes the benefits of deserializing json to a native model. It's still valuable because you can guard against bad data by rejecting at the boundary of your program. In statically typed languages however the added bonus is a lot more significant because the type system increases the benefits of deserializing JSON to native models. Take this Swift example import Foundation enum SerializationError: ErrorType { case InvalidData } struct Thing { let a: Int let b: String static func deserialize(fromDictionary data: [String:AnyObject]) throws -> Thing { guard let a = data["a"] as? Int, let b = data["b"] as? String else { throw SerializationError.InvalidData } return Thing(a: a, b: b) } static func deserialize(fromArray data: [[String: AnyObject]]) -> [Thing] { return data.flatMap { try? deserialize(fromDictionary: $0) } } } let data: [[String: AnyObject]] = [ [ "a": 10 as NSNumber, "b": "Hello" as NSString ], [ "a": "10" as NSString, "b": 10 as NSNumber ] ] let models = Thing.deserialize(fromArray: data) Not only do you end up with a native array of models you can also be certain that any type information is correct because invalid results have been thrown away during parsing.