Sorry, my intent (beside bringing up EDN) was to be playful. Tone is often difficult to communicate in writing. I would have stuck in a `:p` if I hadn't been

Sorry, my intent (beside bringing up EDN) was to be playful. Tone is often difficult to communicate in writing. I would have stuck in a `:p` if I hadn't been on mobile, but it slipped my mind. My apologies; I did not mean to insult or to otherwise be combative or critical. I don't have objective proof that it's the best. It's a mix of personal preference and empirical "evidence" based on past success with both EDN and its granddaddy s-expressions for data exchange and serialization. As for why I personally like EDN so much: 1. It offers the malleability, flexibility, and extensibility of XML, while being 2. even more concise than JSON, 3. straightforward to parse, and 4. precisely defined in a rigorous and language-independent specification. Traits 1-3 it shares with the traditional s-expressions of the Lisp family, but in contrast to s-expressions it's specifically designed as a data exchange format rather than as a lexical/syntactic format for programming languages. The reason this matters is because the traditional Lisp reader is itself extensible, and extensions can't be guaranteed to carry over from dialect to dialect or even from implementation to implementation. Many Lisp readers go so far as to even allow the execution of arbitrary code at read time, which is desirable for source code as it enables metaprogramming, but it's not so desirable when you're parsing data from an arbitrary source, due to security concerns. While EDN does have its roots in Clojure's reader, EDN is not exactly Clojure's external representation. Rather, it's a subset of Clojure's surface syntax in much the same way that JSON is a subset of JavaScript's. Like JSON, EDN works great outside of its "native language" (in fact, I've never used EDN from Clojure itself; I've only used it from Lua, Scheme, Python, C, C++, C#, Java, and JavaScript (not necessarily in that order)).