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Ignore the haters, and other lessons learned from creating JSON5

aseemk.substack.com

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

#71

Post by osrec »

Barrin92 wrote: post #14

I don't think writing an article about hackernews comments from two years ago is exactly what I'd call a lesson in ignoring the haters, but this reads a little bit like someone writing an article about the roaring success of null references after their adoption. despite popularity, most of the technical comments in that original thread aren't wrong. 'Popular', 'Easy to adopt' and 'a very bad idea' can be overlapping…

He is ignoring the haters. He continued despite their comments. He is mindful that the haters exist (which you have to be, in order to ignore them), but is ignoring them with respect to the advice they offer.

The haters were also wrong. They completely misunderstood the needs of the target audience for JSON5. They forgot the world is a messy place, no matter how clean and clear the JSON spec may be, the input from random users may well be messy...

I'm guessing even you simplify your life by using autocorrect and spell check from time to time. Autocorrect has its issues too, it probably makes us lazy and sloppy, but on the whole, it improves the input experience for a lot of users, so on balance, people choose to keep it around.

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

#72

Post by AnimalMuppet »

cassianoleal wrote: post #34
hnusersarelame wrote: post #3

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.

Given you're leaving a criticism on HN, I infer from your own comment you're not worth listening to.

Nice use of recursion ;-)

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

#73

Post by AnimalMuppet »

TylerE wrote: post #47
thrown_22 wrote: post #44

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…

Shockingly about 98% of the population doesn't find massive mounds of nested parens especially readable.

But massive mounds of is readable?

I mean, I guess you know what each tag is closing, which is more than you get with ))))...

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

#74

Post by ajkjk »

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…

> It is a data serialization format intended to be read by software.

This really... doesn't matter. Humans read and write it all the time. If everybody is getting annoyed at it because they're reading it, they have every right to wish it was more human-readable, hence trying to make it so. There's nothing wrong with that.

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

#76

Post by thrown_22 »

TylerE wrote: post #70
thrown_22 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But make the brackets curly and it's fine.

Curly bracket languages don't require braces around every statement. If C was written like {if {x == 1}{ {return {x + 1};} } Maybe you'd have a point

That's nice, but we're not talking about con, we're talking about json.

Also your syntax is terrible. There are already s-expression versions of c:

    (if (== x 1)
        (return (+ x 1)))

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

#77

Post by ryscheng »

On the other side of this, it's fascinating how often people fall susceptible to arguing why something should or shouldn't exist for someone else, rather than just making a limited statement about utility for themselves. Something to stay cognizant of, this article is a good lesson on empathy!

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

#78

Post by fefe23 »

Let me give you a data point from a neutral perspective (I have never heard of you or JSON5).

These were not haters. They in fact went our of their way to give arguments supporting their verdict, and in some cases even constructive suggestions like "make that a preprocessor instead".

Your piece does not make you look like the smartest guy in the room, vindicated by success and adoring fans. It makes you look like someone who confuses internet fame points with something that actually means something. Like a sore loser who needed to convince themselves that they really are the smartest person in the room.

The internet is a trap. No matter how bad your idea is, you will always find people who think it's great.

Just look how many people Alex Jones found who agreed with his Sandy Hook ideas.

Don't go looking for fans. Go looking for people who disagree, as they will help you improve your skills and grow as a person.

If you were actually as good as you apparently think you are, you wouldn't be wasting time writing text like this. You wouldn't need to. Your work would speak for itself. I don't remember Mozart or Einstein lament about their haters.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

fefe23 wrote: post #78

Let me give you a data point from a neutral perspective (I have never heard of you or JSON5). These were not haters. They in fact went our of their way to give arguments supporting their verdict, and in some cases even constructive suggestions like "make that a preprocessor instead". Your piece does not make you look like the smartest guy in the room, vindicated by success and adoring fans. It makes you look like som…

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by bobthepanda »

vlunkr wrote: post #49
furyofantares wrote: post #41

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…

Many of those original comments were pretty spot on though. Maybe the constructive criticism you need sometimes is “don’t do this” 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.

This seems like making a mountain out of a molehill.

> Extending the syntax is undoing all the communal work

JSON5 takes stuff from ES5.1 and adds it to JSON, and ES5 is backwards-compatible with older JS. This means it's fairly trivial to convert JSON5 to JSON (literally 13 lines: https://gist.github.com/iddan/3d34b12f6b22c30a8a07c149b3175e...). And ES5.1 itself was the product of communal work.

> encroaching on grounds that YAML and other languages already cover.

I don't know that we should really start dividing features into nice little boxes so no one steps on each other's toes. Trying different solutions for the same problem can eventually bring us more optimal solutions than if we just sat around twiddling our thumbs because 'it's been done'. It's not like there's an army knocking on your door going "switch to JSON5 or we'll kick your teeth in." People can stick with what they want to do on the merits, but I don't see that as a reason to shut down others' work.

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