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Either it is a terrible format because it is such a massively wasteful (in terms of payload size and cpu overhead to serialize and deserialize) computer to comp

Either it is a terrible format because it is such a massively wasteful (in terms of payload size and cpu overhead to serialize and deserialize) computer to computer interchange format, or it is terrible because it doesn't have comments.

jrockway 7y ago
Yeah, it's not a very good computer-to-computer format. No bytes type. No integer type. No Any->Any maps. Being bad at something doesn't automatically make you good at something else, and JSON is no exception. It's bad at everything except being popular. You have to look at JSON in a historical context to understand it. It exists so that someone could get some data into their Javascript program with "eval". It was then standardized so that you didn't need a full Javascript engine to understand it, because Python and Perl and Ruby didn't have one, and it turned out that evalling random data from the Internet was a security disaster. Does that make it a good human-readable config file? Nope. Does that make it a good interface definition language? Nope. It exists because it got popular early, and now we're stuck with it. Now it's too late to apply band-aids to make it a human-readable config language or a good computer-to-computer interchange format, because you will always have old parsers around and people will naturally want to target those. Trust me, 99% of developers will moan when you tell them that they have to use GRPC+Protos to access your API. They will be equally mad about your JSON extension that has comments and integers in it, because the dialect of Brainfuck they use for all their projects doesn't have a library that supports those extensions and their editor can't syntax-highlight it or autoformat it. I would like to give you a solution to this problem, but there isn't one. JSON "won", but it's bad at everything except being well-understood. That seems to be all that people really care about.

jrockway 7y ago

Yeah, it's not a very good computer-to-computer format. No bytes type. No integer type. No Any->Any maps. Being bad at something doesn't automatically make you good at something else, and JSON is no exception. It's bad at everything except being popular. You have to look at JSON in a historical context to understand it. It exists so that someone could get some data into their Javascript program with "eval". It was then standardized so that you didn't need a full Javascript engine to understand it, because Python and Perl and Ruby didn't have one, and it turned out that evalling random data from the Internet was a security disaster. Does that make it a good human-readable config file? Nope. Does that make it a good interface definition language? Nope. It exists because it got popular early, and now we're stuck with it. Now it's too late to apply band-aids to make it a human-readable config language or a good computer-to-computer interchange format, because you will always have old parsers around and people will naturally want to target those. Trust me, 99% of developers will moan when you tell them that they have to use GRPC+Protos to access your API. They will be equally mad about your JSON extension that has comments and integers in it, because the dialect of Brainfuck they use for all their projects doesn't have a library that supports those extensions and their editor can't syntax-highlight it or autoformat it. I would like to give you a solution to this problem, but there isn't one. JSON "won", but it's bad at everything except being well-understood. That seems to be all that people really care about.