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Human readable formats should exist for more or less one purpose, interfacing with a human, eg configuration.
by afloyd 3y ago
Human readable formats should exist for more or less one purpose, interfacing with a human, eg configuration.
- timcobb 3y agoDeveloping and debugging systems with JSON (vs, say, protocol buffers) is much easier… configuration is rarely interfaced with by humans vs. debug logs or dumps etc, which are always being looked at.
- userbinator 3y agoIt's not hard to read what isn't "human readable" anyway; it just takes a little bit of practice and learning. For example, I can "sight-read" x86 and Z80 Asm from a hexdump, and bits of ASN.1 and a few other proprietary protocols too.
- userbinator 3y agoDid I strike a nerve? It's unfortunate that so many seem to be under the impression that "human readable" is really an euphemism for "like English" and are narrow/closed-minded enough to not consider the possibility that people can learn just about any language with enough exposure and a bit of effort. 4f 6e 63 65 20 79 6f 75 20 73 74 6f 70 20 6c 65 61 72 6e 69 6e 67 2c 20 79 6f 75 20 73 74 61 72 74 20 64 79 69 6e 67 2e
- hyperpape 3y agoYou didn’t strike a nerve, but your comment is misguided. Of course people can read binary formats. It is just that they read them more slowly, and it requires quite a bit of exposure/practice, so that people usually invest in tooling to simplify the process. I suggest that when you see a comment like this, you ask yourself “if I change ‘human readable’ to ‘easily human readable’ would I need to offer my correction?”
- code_biologist 3y agoYour comment comes across the same way as that long ago "Show HN" where somebody said that Dropbox is pretty much just rsync.
- catiopatio 3y agoWith something like protocol buffers, you have an explicit schema, parsing is well-defined, and you rarely (if ever) need to manually inspect the serialized representation.
- deepsun 3y agoBut json is terrible for configuration, e.g. comments are absolutely required. Toml and Hocon are for configuration.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agojson isn't human readable, it's a serialization format that happens to use ascii.
- jmull 3y agoDevelopers are the humans (at least for now) that interface with JSON. And devs don't care about just config files put API requests and responses and any other kind of structured/semi-structured communication and data.