Yes but that's the underlying system, not your "application code" handling the structure parsing. Maybe I shouldn't have said JSON, but you do always get a Java

Yes but that's the underlying system, not your "application code" handling the structure parsing. Maybe I shouldn't have said JSON, but you do always get a JavaScript object back, as opposed to UNIX filesystem/socket operations which only really return application/x-octet-stream data. I thought that was the thesis of the article: it'd be a better world if your operating system supported parsing common structures for you.