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There may be a tiny bit of signal in such comments but it's mostly just noise. I try to just ignore any comment that looks like the commenter just wrote whatever came to their mind, they're gonna forget about it in 10 seconds too when they're off to the next thing to react to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience, the current generation of programmers value convenience beyond everything else, with a great margin. This is not wrong per se, but it calls for much more complex code which handles all the edge cases, and hurts performance at the end of the day. Then, this small performance penalties pile-up and the same developers ask why their code is not working as fast as it should. I don't call for very pedan…
I don’t think this is in any way specific to the current generation of programmers. The generation that learned with BASIC or used Smalltalk or Lisp in college is decidedly an older generation at this point. If performance is important, you profile. Optimizing your configuration format for parsing speed is likely a bad decision unless you’ve identified that it’s a problem.
I personally prefer to choose a simpler, and a bit more pedantic versions of stuff whenever I develop something, and while it doesn’t break performance records OOTB, the performance is always beyond reasonable at the first iteration.
So with this logic, I’ll just prefer “vanilla json” whenever I need to use it as a data exchange format, or a well established and fast XML parser, and leave at it.
This logic made my life way easier, but it’s just me, and I respect other developers’ choices.
Mine is just an observation rather than a rant.
OTOH, using a simpler set of components will reduce the probability of breakage a lot, too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449263
While there were some really good comments, the vast majority were very negative and critical. (BTW: the comments on HN were much more civil than on Slashdot where the story also got picked up) Still, I didn't ignore the criticism but tried to learn from it and there were some encouraging comments mixed in as well.
Json is trying to square the circle of "I want things to be easy" but also "I want to not shoot myself in the foot", goals which are mutually exclusive. Every new version of json is just gods way of teaching people how XML got to be the mess it is.
I'm kind of appalled that the Hashicorp guy went that far to put someone down for just building something they found useful to themselves. What a great way to discourage someone from expressing themselves creatively. Glad Aseem carried on regardless.
I completely understand the reaction and find his repo a very appropriate response.
I still don't get what the point of json is. If you want to dump raw JS data structures as text just do. You don't need a spec or special tools. If you want human readable XML just use s-expressions. Something that's so easy to parse you can roll your own in an afternoon. Json is trying to square the circle of "I want things to be easy" but also "I want to not shoot myself in the foot", goals which are mutually exclu…
The kind of people who leave criticism on HN are not worth listening to anyway. Most of the users of this site have no taste and think they're more brilliant / important than they actually are.
Non-constructive criticism is extremely easy to produce and can make the author of it feel smart for a second. Doing it in a place where folks share their creative works is like shooting fish in a barrel. There may be a tiny bit of signal in such comments but it's mostly just noise. I try to just ignore any comment that looks like the commenter just wrote whatever came to their mind, they're gonna forget about it in…
JSON is useful partially because it’s easy to parse, so parsers already exist in every language. Extending the syntax is undoing all the communal work, and encroaching on grounds that YAML and other languages already cover.
I'm kind of appalled that the Hashicorp guy went that far to put someone down for just building something they found useful to themselves. What a great way to discourage someone from expressing themselves creatively. Glad Aseem carried on regardless.
Umm you can find burning trash in your backyard useful to yourself - but it's still polluting the neighborhood (eg. people using this crap in APIs or pulling down useless dependencies to get this). It's especially bad if you start promoting your practices and get your neighbors start doing this as well. I completely understand the reaction and find his repo a very appropriate response.
But for a second it makes them feel smart.