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Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

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Re: Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

#131

Post by Dylan16807 »

inopinatus wrote: post #110
kryptiskt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first two sentences of the text on http://json.org are "JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write." It's a primary goal of JSON, it's fair to question whether it's successful at it. Personally, I'd much rather write TOML or S expressions. I don't like YAML at all, the whitespace sensitivity drives me nuts.

Douglas Crockford usually says he discovered JSON, and subsequently named it and wrote a specification, and I think this precludes suggesting it had design goals, because it wasn't an invention. More broadly, I also think this understanding of JSON's origins absolves the discoverers of its limitations, and opens the door to talking about improvements and variations. Notwithstanding which, I too would prefer to interc…

He made changes that were based on design goals. He simplified a few parts, and removed comments with the explicitly stated goal of avoiding parsing directives.

We can say the underlying idea of taking javascript's object syntax was a discovery, but he refined it between discovery and release.

Re: Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

#132

Post by remram »

justinlloyd wrote: post #88

In videogames, "If there are enemies ahead of you, then you are going the right now." I have long held the belief that if the audience of Reddit or Twitter or Slashdot or Hackernews universally hates something with such vehemance that you doubt your own thoughts then you are probably doing the right thing. In the words of Casey Neistat, in his video "Do what you can't." - "To the haters, the doubters, my 7th grade vi…

That's a terrible outlook. You are saying that all negative feedback should be ignored by everybody and treated as a positive sign. This is insane.

Re: Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

#133

Post by inopinatus »

xbar wrote: post #123
inopinatus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Douglas Crockford usually says he discovered JSON, and subsequently named it and wrote a specification, and I think this precludes suggesting it had design goals, because it wasn't an invention. More broadly, I also think this understanding of JSON's origins absolves the discoverers of its limitations, and opens the door to talking about improvements and variations. Notwithstanding which, I too would prefer to interc…

I don't follow your discovery/goal-less-ness argument. Why couldn't one of the things present in his discovery be readability? +1 on those S-expressions.

Early versions of JSON supported // comments. As Crockford tells the story, they were removed because folks were using them for pragma, leading to interoperability issues, and because several parser authors working in languages other than Javascript reported surprising levels of complexity when implementing comments.

My point being; aspects that seem like irritating omissions now, may have been editing decisions instrumental in the overall adoption of the standard.

Re: Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

#134

Post by auxym »

dietrichepp wrote: post #40
codedokode wrote: post #16

Honestly I don't understand why JSON should be human-readable. It is a data serialization format intended to be read by software. Just adding comments and multi-line strings doesn't make it human-readable, it is still too bloated and I don't like writing it manually. If you want a human-readable format, try at least to remove unnecessary quotes, brackets and commas and make it look similar to YAML. JSON is not intend…

> JSON is not intended to be used in configs and other user-editable files. Yes, but it’s a bit late for that. It sounds like you’re advocating for a configuration format somewhere in the space between JSON and YAML. Not JSON, because it’s annoying to write by hand, no comments, no trailing commas. Not YAML, because of all those unintuitive edge cases like “no” (unquoted) being a Boolean. It sounds like the primary d…

KDL comes to mind : https://kdl.dev/

Re: Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

#135

Post by wildwildtest »

mikkergp wrote: post #105
wildwildtest wrote: post #86

I think the real lesson is that popularity is a poor way of understanding whether something is actually useful or good, it can indicate those qualities but meaningless without also applying our reasoning faculties too. The author appears to remain oblivious to any of the very good reasons why people don’t like alternative json formats and incapable of incorporating that into their understanding of people’s reaction.…

Except Mitchell explicitly called the author out in his satire and the author was right that Mitchell thought in retrospect it was a mistake to do so. Why is it in poor character if he’s expressing a view Mitchell agrees with. Additionally in terms of the criticism, I observe the inverse phenomena to what you describe. You say that popularity isn’t a good indicator of goodness, but I think the inverse is goodness isn…

> Except …

I think that’s the sleight of hand occurring right, it’s reasonable to say he might mot have linked to it, but the purpose of the repo was not to shame the author. It might be my own predilection, but it strikes me as dishonest to say “I didn’t mind this” and then imply the opposite.

> Additionally …

Right, me too, they both occur. I don’t think I actually specified an argument as to why json5 is bad or even argued that it was. My comment is mainly about the article itself.

This whole paragraph reads as an argument to not use json5 given that it is very much trying to perfect the imperfect json, which most people just get on with.

Re: Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

#137

Post by kag0 »

secondcoming wrote: post #6

Does ‘downloads per day’ actually mean anything? It could be someone large company’s CI system building on every commit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a JSON5 file in the wild. I’ve always wanted comments in JSON, but the other issues highlighted are not things I care about. The ‘be lenient in what you accept’ philosophy is a disaster, just look at HTTP… stricter is better IMO.

Valid question, the article has a footer

> JSON5 is in the top 500 by both dependents and PageRank

that probably confirms the project is significant but doesn't answer your question.

Re: Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

#139

Post by wruza »

sacrosancty wrote: post #87

Perhaps the fact that it's popular is exactly what those nay-sayers were worried about. They didn't want a more fragmented world of incompatible standards.

Some appealed to unrealistic things though, like “all decent text editors should help to make json typing/formatting bearable instead”. Yeah, that totally worked before and will work this time too. We’d all do much better if our standard formats weren’t such an annoyance to work with in the name of something that computers wouldn’t even notice eventually. If there is a void inside a busy place, it will be filled regardless. With that in mind, think what would happen if something much less adequate filled that void. They didn’t want world which couldn’t care less about how anyone wanted it to be. But that’s what we can only have.

Re: Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

#140

Post by scient »

arinlen wrote: post #111
gervwyk wrote: post #15

I enjoy using json5. I solves a real problem imo.. Regarding the criticism, I get the same bad energy when people get a kick out of fixing someone’s grammar, and then do not even comprehend what is being complicated. Well done on the lib and thanks for building something useful! Good writeup also! Think I’m going to give the commit access trick a shot.

> I enjoy using json5. I solves a real problem imo.. And what problem would that be?

Same one that HTML7 solves.
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