I don't believe in the premise of your idea. Most of the time stuff can be done using standard data structures—things like numbers, strings, lists and maps of t

I don't believe in the premise of your idea. Most of the time stuff can be done using standard data structures—things like numbers, strings, lists and maps of those and so on. Intermediate structures like JSON are only needed for storage and transmission. Inasfar as the need for storage and transmission in turn necessitates the same recurrent task of data serialization, it totally makes sense to reuse tools that have been around for a long time and been optimized for most use cases—so why re-invent databases, JSON parsers and entire wire protocols when more or less optimized tools of the sort are already there? Google wrote protobufs as a replacement for JSON, and while it does offer things beyond JSON like data typing, the appraisal is not unanimous. It is also hard to replace a mature DBMS like Postgres or SQLite with a from-scratch, purpose-made solution without failing on every single useful metric like throughput, feature completeness and reliability. Personally I too think parsing should be easier in this day and age; I believe Raku (Perl 6) has made meaningful strides in that direction. Other than that, I feel parsing is somewhat over- and lexing is somewhat underrated, if anything. In my experience lexing is really the step you want most to get data out of a byte sequence, and I agree that that should and could be much easier. FWIW JavaScript's RegExes recently obtained the 'sticky flag' which is ultra-beneficial for lexing. Not sure why that bit took so long.