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JSON with Commas and Comments

nigeltao.github.io

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Re: JSON with Commas and Comments

#71

Post by jtdev »

Lazare wrote: post #29
aaron-santos wrote: post #2

> Yes, Doug Crockford deliberately removed comments from JSON but people keep putting them back in. If we’re going to have comment-enriched JSON (e.g. for human-editable configuration files), we might as well have a standard one. The text "deliberately removed comments from JSON" links to https://web.archive.org/web/20150105080225if_/https://plus.g... where Doug not only explains the reason, but also a solution which…

Given the number of times people have invented and re-invented JSON + comments, I think it's clear there is a demand for JSON + comments, and that Crockford's view that you can solve everything by asking people to manually strip the comments out before parsing the JSON isn't viable.

Petabytes of JSON formatted data flowing across the internet every second of every day disagree with your assessment.

Re: JSON with Commas and Comments

#72

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

redisman wrote: post #61
colejohnson66 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m going to use “JSON with comments” that I have to run through a preprocessor before parsing, why not just use a language where comments are explicitly allowed (YAML, TOML, etc.)? Crockford’s answer is not a solution. His words can be rewritten as: “you want comments? Use a different language that looks and feels like JSON, but isn’t.” All that does is add confusion. The only reason JSON is as popular as it is i…

> The only reason JSON is as popular I mean I remember using XML for serialization back in the day and how it made we want to kill anyone who was involved in its creation. JSON won because it’s a great and simple standard and yes because it maps 1:1 to js. It was very popular with people who hated js when it came out too - just because of how much better it was than the other options

I think the move from XML to JSON mirrored a lot of the overall switch in the software industry at large from unnecessarily overly complicated "design-by-committee" specs to simple, get-shit-done practicality. (Heck, anyone remember the horror that was the original EJB spec, or god forbid, CORBA?) The rise in scripting languages like Python and JS on the backend is another example of this.

Re: JSON with Commas and Comments

#75

Post by qyv »

coldtea wrote: post #58
didibus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using JSON for configuration could be the mistake? That wasn't the original goal of JSON.

> That wasn't the original goal of JSON. That's neither here, nor there. The narrow vision many/most tools were created with is laughable compared to the actual creative uses people put them into. Heck, the internet wasn't created for collaborating, socializing, shopping, reading, listening to music, etc., anyway, it was created to have a war-proof network for army use, yet here we are...

Who is to say what to legitimate use and what is misuse of a creation if not the creator?

Re: JSON with Commas and Comments

#76

Post by qbasic_forever »

Alternatively, just use JSON as a low-level data interchange much like a CSV file. Put all your human-managed content in a configuration language that emits JSON, like jsonnet, cue, dahl, etc. These languages add comments, function, variables, and much, much more (like fancy data cascades, validation, schemas, imports, etc.) to make managing configuration at scale easy.

Re: JSON with Commas and Comments

#77

Post by tlb »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #73

Could we solve dates first, then worry about comments and commas?

Truly representing dates would make the semantics more complicated than JSON, Javascript, CSS, and C++20 combined.

The practical approaches are to represent it as time since the Epoch (in floating point) or a string where both sides somehow agree what "03/04/05" means.

Re: JSON with Commas and Comments

#78

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

qyv wrote: post #75
coldtea wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That wasn't the original goal of JSON. That's neither here, nor there. The narrow vision many/most tools were created with is laughable compared to the actual creative uses people put them into. Heck, the internet wasn't created for collaborating, socializing, shopping, reading, listening to music, etc., anyway, it was created to have a war-proof network for army use, yet here we are...

Who is to say what to legitimate use and what is misuse of a creation if not the creator?

The people who use it.

It's like the inventor of gif declaring it is pronounced 'jif'. Who cares, basically nobody else says it like that.

Re: JSON with Commas and Comments

#79

Post by tshaddox »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53
tshaddox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that lots of people want to comment their package.json file and can’t easily due to Crockford’s decision does not mean that Crockford’s argument is nonsense. Crockford’s argument is not that there shouldn’t be comments in JSON because no one would want to use them. And again, I would also like to have comments in JSON.

My point is that I don't buy Crockford's argument, at all, against having comments in JSON. "I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability". So instead you have people coming up with a million different bad hacks to support comments in non standard ways (e.g. "fake comment" properties, duplicate keys, etc.) Coupled…

I’ve personally never encountered any combination of JSON-encoded data and JSON parser that didn’t work perfectly together. I don’t know whether the right trade-offs were made between interoperability and other features, but I’d say it’s very clear that if interoperability was a chief design goal, it was executed extremely well.

Re: JSON with Commas and Comments

#80

Post by exporectomy »

aaron-santos wrote: post #2

> Yes, Doug Crockford deliberately removed comments from JSON but people keep putting them back in. If we’re going to have comment-enriched JSON (e.g. for human-editable configuration files), we might as well have a standard one. The text "deliberately removed comments from JSON" links to https://web.archive.org/web/20150105080225if_/https://plus.g... where Doug not only explains the reason, but also a solution which…

Oh, it's because people were abusing them. I thought it must have been that you can't read a file then write it back out without either losing the comments or having a whole special data structure to store them in.
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